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14.2: RETHINKING THE WRITING CENTER

VOL 14, NO 2 (2017): RETHINKING THE WRITING CENTER TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COLUMNS From the Editors James Garner and Alejandro Omidsalar The History of US Writing Centers and the Emergence of Writing Centers in Latin America: An Interview with Neal Lerner Violeta Molina-Natera

FOCUS ARTICLES Mindfulness in the Writing Center: A Total Encounter Elizabeth Mack and Katie Hupp Kairotic Situations: A Spatial Rethinking of the Burkean Parlor in the Writing Center Elizabeth Busekrus Cinderella’s Slipper: Research Methodology and the Search for the Right Fit Kathryn Raign Toward a Rhetoric of Labor Activism in College and University Writing Centers Liliana M. Naydan Alternative Venues: An EFL Writing Center Outside the University Brooke Ricker Schreiber and Snežana Đurić A Systematic Approach to Writing Groups: Feedback Structure, First Meeting, and Facilitator Claire McMurray Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends: Graduate v. Undergraduate Tutor Identities in Professionalization Jennifer Grouling and Elisabeth Buck BOOK REVIEWS Review of Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond Mary Hedengren

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Elisabeth H. Buck, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In addition to teaching courses on writing center theory and practice, she also directs the campus’s Writing and Reading Center.

Elizabeth Busekrus, M.A., is the Writing Lab Coordinator at Missouri Baptist University. She received her M.A. in English, with a specialization in the Teaching of Writing, from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She has been published in The Writing Lab Newsletter and FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty. She is passionate about research and enjoys learning new ways to approach writing because it allows her to express her creativity.

Snežana Đurić, M.A., graduated with a master's degree in English Linguistics from the University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy, Serbia. Interested in world cultures and languages, Snežana wrote her master’s thesis in the field of Contrastive Linguistics comparing kinship terms in English and Serbian. She works as a marketing project manager in Niš, Serbia.

Jennifer Grouling, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English and former Writing Center Director at Ball State University. She studies writing program administration, including graduate teaching assistant preparation and assessment.

Mary Hedengren, Ph.D., completed a post-doc in 2015-16 focusing on research in graduate student writing. During that time, her own writing group read drafts of this review. She now teaches at the University of Houston, Clear Lake where she participates in another faculty writing group.

Katie Hupp, Ph.D., is an English Instructor and Writing Center Coordinator for Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska, where she directs over 40 consultants across five campuses.

Elizabeth Mack, M.A., is a Writing Center Consultant for Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska. She also maintains the writing center blog, Writing Center Underground.

Claire McMurray received her Ph.D. in French with a minor in Film Studies from Yale University in 2010. From 2010 to 2013 she worked in higher education administration in study abroad and fellowships. In addition, she taught first-year experience and film courses. She joined the field of Writing Center administration in August 2013 when she began working as the Graduate Writing Specialist at the University of Kansas Writing Center. She currently creates writing resources for graduate students, gives workshops, organizes graduate/research write-ins, and coordinates graduate writing groups.

Violeta Molina-Natera, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali, Colombia. Molina-Natera earned her Ph.D. in Education at Universidad Pedagogica Nacional in Colombia and an M.A. in Linguistics from the Universidad del Valle, Colombia. Molina-Natera is the founder and director of Centro de Escritura Javeriano (Javeriano Writing Center). She has also served as director of the Latin American Writing Centers and Writing Programs Network. She is also a member of Writing Across Borders LAT-WRAB and the International Writing Centers

also a member of Writing Across Borders LAT-WRAB and the International Writing Centers Association. Additionally, she has served on the Association Board on behalf of Latin American Regional. Molina-Natera has been nominated for the Muriel Harris Outstanding Service Award in 2014 and won the Luiz Antonio Marcushi Travel Award of CCCC 2016.

Liliana M. Naydan, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English and the Writing Program Coordinator at Penn State Abington. Her research centers on writing centers, rhetoric and composition, multiliteracy, social justice, contemporary American literature, the literature of 9/11, and religion. Her work on these subjects has appeared in journals including Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation, Academic Exchange Quarterly, The John Updike Review, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

Kathryn Raign, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where she has served as the Director of Composition, Director of Developmental Writing, and Director of the UNT Writing Lab. She is the author of several texts, including: Writing for Results: An Introduction to Writing in the Real World of Science and Technology, The Decisive Writer, and Writing Now. Her research interests include the history of the writing lab, the origins of professional writing, and writing center practices.

Brooke Ricker Schreiber, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her research focuses on writing pedagogy in English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings, including ways of supporting multilingual writers across the curriculum.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 2 (2017)

FROM THE EDITORS James Garner & Alejandro Omidsalar The University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com We here at Praxis are delighted to bring you our Spring 2017 issue, “Rethinking the Writing Center.”

For this issue we have assembled articles that offer new and exciting ways for writing centers to revise and reconsider their current practices. In some ways this might be a mundane way to think about writing center scholarship. Are we not always trying to find new ways forward—new ways of understanding the work that we do as writing center administrators, consultants, and scholars? Yet this perpetual drive is what makes writing center studies such a vibrant field in which to work.

Given the relationships we cultivate with the students who visit our centers to grow as writers and our surrounding institutions, it’s vital that we constantly consider the best possible ways to serve our consultants, consultees, and the broader institutional networks of which our centers are a part. Instead of being stuck in old methodologies, writing center scholars are ever paring away what doesn’t work and replacing it with new, more effective approaches to improving the writing (and writing practices) of our tutees.

To this end, the articles in this collection offer a multitude of ways and possibilities for rethinking not only what the writing center does but also what the writing center is. This has, of course, been a perennial concern of writing center studies since the publication of Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center.”

We hope that the work in this issue follows in this tradition of continually reimagining the writing center, offering additional glimpses of what the future possibilities of writing centers hold. The articles in this issue renegotiate the theory, practice, and identity of the writing center both in and out of the familiar academic institutions and boundaries within which writing centers usually operate.

This issue’s column, by Violeta Molina-Natera, is an interview with Neal Lerner that considers both the history of writing centers in the United States and

compares that history with the recent emergence of writing centers in Latin American countries. As Latin American writing centers forge their own unique identities, they are influenced by the work of their North American precursors while incorporating their own cultural contexts. Molina-Natera and Lerner’s conversation is exciting and illuminating, and we hope our readers enjoy it.

In “Mindfulness in the Writing Center,” Elizabeth Mack and Katie Hupp report their experience conducting a program that asked their writing consultants to incorporate a number of mindfulness and contemplation-based techniques into their writing center practice. Mack and Hupp conclude that “the benefits of incorporating a mindfulness-based practice are two-fold: the students receive focused attention and assistance, and consultants experience reduced stress and anxiety” (14).

Elizabeth Busekrus calls for writing center administrators and consultants to rethink Kenneth Burke’s parlor metaphor for academic conversation by examining its relationship to the spatial dimensions of the ancient rhetorical concept of kairos, or the opportune moment. Busekrus suggests that paying attention to “kairos transforms the space-place boundaries of the writing center, and ultimately, the writing, the tutor, and the student, disrupting the norm and leading to the invention of something new” (19).

Another crucial aspect of rethinking the writing center involves reimagining the methodologies that we use to assess our work. Kathryn Raign investigates whether or not the recent push toward RAD research in writing center studies is as desirable as it initially seems. Raign uses a quasi-experimental approach to demonstrate how writing center directors can use statistics and varied research tactics to their advantage in a climate of increasing institutional corporatization.

On the same wavelength, Liliana M. Naydan argues that writing center studies would benefit from

From the Editors • adopting labor movement-oriented activist rhetoric in discussions of the contingent status of writing center professionals. Drawing crucial parallels between academics and organizers—such as a shared attention to language and appreciation for collaboration— Naydan models methods for writing center professionals to resist institutional corporatization.

Brooke Ricker Schreiber and Snežana Đurić’s work interrogates the boundaries of what constitutes a writing center as they tell the story of their experiences establishing a writing center outside of the familiar institutional setting of the university. The “alternative venue” of their title was a writing center in Niš, Serbia located in an American Embassy-funded resource center. Learning from both the familiar and new trials they encountered, they offer recommendations for those wanting to run writing centers outside of the traditional institutional infrastructures.

In “A Systematic Approach to Graduate Writing Groups,” Claire McMurray shares the struggles she encountered in developing graduate writing groups in her writing center. After assessing the data from her first few rounds of writing groups, she developed a systematic method for ensuring increased success for those groups. She shares this tripartite method in this issue of Praxis in the hopes that it will be useful and productive for other future graduate collaborations.

In their article, Jennifer Grouling and Elisabeth Buck think about writing center work and how it helps consultants negotiate their identities as professionals and consultants. Specifically, Grouling and Buck navigate the gaps and occasional tensions between graduate and undergraduate tutor populations and how those relationships can and should be improved to better augment the center’s role as a space for productive academic exchanges.

Finally, I (James) am passing the torch of senior managing editor to Alejandro Omidsalar and welcoming our newest managing editor, Sarah Riddick.

Alejandro has been an invaluable co-editor and exceptionally fast learner in the few months he’s been on our staff, and I am incredibly grateful to him for stepping into the role of managing editor. Sarah, a fellow doctoral student here at UT’s Department of Rhetoric and Writing, is a seasoned editor, and I look forward to her tenure at Praxis. I am excited to leave my post knowing that the journal is in their more than

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capable hands. My time at Praxis has been invaluable to my development as a teacher and scholar, helping me to reconceive not only how I coach my students in the writing center session and in the classroom but also how I approach my own research. Most importantly, I’m grateful to you, our contributors and readers, for your participation in and support of Praxis. Thank you for the work you do in our rapidly expanding and progressing field.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 2 (2017) www.praxisuwc.com!

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 2 (2017)

THE HISTORY OF US WRITING CENTERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF WRITING CENTERS IN LATIN AMERICA: AN INTERVIEW WITH NEAL LERNER Violeta Molina-Natera Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali-Colombia vmolina@javerianacali.edu.co Especially in the last five years, writing centers have begun to emerge in Latin America. They resemble the sense and philosophy of writing centers in the United States but with an identity that is still developing. As part of the summer course “Writing Center History, Theory, Research, and Administration,” led by Dr. Rebecca Babcock at the University of Texas of Permian Basin, I interviewed Professor Neal Lerner, one of the leading scholars of writing center theory, history, and administration. My aim in conducting this interview was to consult Prof.

Lerner’s expertise to try and understand the development of this field in the United States and compare it with recent trends in Latin America. Dr. Lerner is associate professor at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Writing Program. He has won the International Writing Centers Association Outstanding Scholarship Award five times. Two of his books have also won awards.

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory won the NCTE David Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English in 2011. Also, along with his coauthors Mya Poe and Jennifer Craig, he won the CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award in 2012 with the book Learning to Communicate as a Scientist and Engineer: Case Studies from MIT. He is co-author with Paula Gillespie of The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, a recognized book for training writing tutors. He was editor of Writing Center Journal from 2002 to 2008 with Beth Boquet. Currently he is working with Michele Eodice and Anne Ellen Geller in a cross-institutional study of undergraduates’ most meaningful writing projects (http://meaningfulwritingproject.net). This interview took place via Skype on June of 2016 and was recorded for transcription. It has been edited for clarity and readability.

Violeta: What were the main reasons for creating writing centers in the U.S.?

Neal: The creation of writing centers, as we know them, has been standardized or institutionalized. This was tied to enrollment patterns, so as the access to U.S. higher education broadened—and it did in different time periods starting in the 1890s—suddenly students were far less prepared than previous generations. !

Those students were more working class, they had come through public schools rather than elite private schools, and that access broadened from 1890 to 1980.

As those students came to U.S. higher education, their reading, writing, and communication skills were sometimes deficient, and that’s the tie to remediation. I think there are lots of class and socio-economic reasons for that; the students communicated in different ways than the faculty were used to, and the way the faculty did, the access was broadened socioeconomically, so I think writing centers were one response to that movement around literacy. It’s an institutional response. When I say that I mean institutions, as a whole entity, feel that they need to do something. They don’t always want to commit to solving a problem, but they feel like they need to do something, and sometimes it’s almost peer pressure if they see other institutions— “Oh, you have a writing center, we need one too!” When I say institutionalized writing centers, I think there has been some writing support in maybe informal ways as long as there has been higher education. Maybe it was just informal tutoring, maybe it was some students taking their own initiative to do peer review, but there’s been something. That sort of institutional response is something that we would recognize as a writing center, led then to have to find someone to get to be an administrator, and then that person plays a role and has a certain status within the institution and all those kinds of factors become important. With my tracing of it, it really isn’t until around the 1930’s in this country that this model became more widespread.

VM: In Latin America there are also these remedial reasons, but at this point many people start a writing center because you need to put these students with language deficiency at the same point of the others, but I don’t know Dr. Lerner, it is still the same reason? Nowadays, what are some of the other reasons to create a new writing center?

NL: There are lots of reasons in this moment; it is related to how U.S. higher education is changing. I’m sure that’s true for Latin America as well, and one of the phenomena in this country is that many new writing centers are coming out of larger centers for academic support, rather than coming out of an

An Interview with Neal Lerner • English department or writing program with a kind of academic side to it, and those are often tied to particular courses—this country, first-year writing most notably, or first-year composition. Writing centers are a kind of support mechanism for that and the students in those courses, so the ones that are coming out of academic support are often part of larger tutoring centers as math tutoring, physics, whatever subject.

Sometimes they have study skills, sometimes they have all kinds of programming that supports students when they come out of the Student Affairs side of the university, which is in this country quite different. I think that something’s been going on for in this country at least 25 years, but the sort of recognition that students need support services in that kind of way, and those run from mental health services to academic, to social, and writing centers are one piece of them.

That explains some of the continued growth. It seems some writing centers that were part of departments are now part of these larger student support centers, and I think that’s partially efficiency of an organization saying “why do we need all these different things”, “let’s all bring them together under one roof.” I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.

Another phenomenon along those lines is a lot of writing centers, new or old, are being shifted and doing collaborations with libraries. And libraries have always been about student support and academic support so that partnership makes a lot of natural sense. It can be a physical partnership. There’re lots of writing centers now housed in the campus library, and then there’re the other kinds of support where the library personnel and the writing center personnel are working closely together to support students around research, finding sources, about how to use sources, and then how to write about sources, so it’s another one of those partnerships that just makes a lot of sense.

VM: I want to ask you about the role of writing center director.

How did this position start, how did it evolve, and how do we see it in this moment?

NL: I don’t think it’s exactly an evolution. In some of the early writing centers, the directors were faculty who were doing it in addition to whatever else they were doing. But also in some of the early writing centers they were just people hired for some reason, sometimes they were a spouse of a faculty member, sometimes they just seem to have some sort of expertise and they were just put in a position to run a writing center. A major tension that runs throughout the history of writing centers is the question of should the administrator, or should the writing center director be a faculty member, with faculty member status, or a non-faculty person? But even the answer to that is

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complicated. I’ve been in the role of the writing program administrator who is a faculty member and who is not a faculty member, and at the institutions where I was playing that role I would much rather to be a faculty member; and when I say faculty member I mean someone who’s on the tenure track or has tenure and has that status within the institution. In some of the surveys that have been done in this country of this institutional state of writing center directors, the numbers are kind of all over the place because the data are [confusing]. There was a recent survey that I think it’s going to be a little more reliable, but the numbers are still pretty uneven in terms of how many writing center directors occupy faculty-tenure-track faculty positions and how many don’t.1 I know of places where the writing center director was a faculty member and that person leaves, retires, and then they hire a staff person, non-faculty person, and I’ve heard the other. When I got hired in my current university, I was hired as a writing center director and a faculty member, and I was the first in thirty years of that writing center; I was the first faculty tenure track writing center director, so things change. I know institutions where it’s a lot easier to create positions that are non-faculty; they cost less, the institution makes a much shorter commitment, or less of a commitment to the position when they do that. In some ways they’re easier to get, so if people in institutions are trying to create a writing center and get a director, they probably have a better shot at it if they’re not hiring a faculty tenure-track person. And I think that rise of the student success centers or student support centers, and then writing center director is coming out of those entities. Usually the history of those centers in this country is not that they’re run by faculty, they’re run by specialists who aren’t; they don’t have that kind of academic degree because they don’t need to, that’s not where they’re coming from. Those entities won’t hire a faculty member to run a writing center; it’ll be pretty unlikely.

So those both worlds are operating simultaneously in this country.

VM: As you said, currently there are some writing center directors with no graduate background, and this could be an obstacle if they don’t have a degree in something related to writing center studies; and you can imagine what’s happening in Latin America when we don’t have a common core of education for writing center directors. I am curious about how it would affect a writing center professional to lack an educational background to support them in their job as writing center director. Is it really an obstacle if the writing center director doesn’t have any background about composition, about writing, or about writing center studies?

NL: I think not always, but there’s a bigger chance of someone not doing a very good job. I’ve worked for

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An Interview with Neal Lerner •

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years with faculty across the curriculum on teaching with writing in their courses and not all those people have training or experience on teaching with writing in some way or another. Some of them still do a good job. They had good instincts or they themselves learned to write in ways that they are applying to how to teach others how to write, so they know “well, let’s see writing is a process, so people need to revise.” Or, “I should give feedback that isn’t just correcting grammar and maybe it’ll be more effective.” There are a few principles that they learned themselves because they’ve had good instruction that they can then apply to their students, but to depend on that is not a very good plan for success and that’s why there’s training.

It’s not as if every writing center director in this country is a star and knows what they’re doing. I’ve been at regional meetings and there are people there who are running writing centers who really don’t have much background in it. It’s still the case that there are places where it’s a faculty writing center director; the institution will choose a faculty member from some other discipline, some random discipline. It’s that person’s turn go run the writing center, and they usually think “I don’t know what I’m doing,” so they’ll turn to colleagues at other places and say “what should I do?” Is there now a Latin American writing centers association where people can have colleagues and resources?

students learn to write—how those are feeding each other, or not. That could be an interesting tension, too.

VM: Yes, we are working on that. We have one network. I am the director of this network, and we have had two conferences; the first one was in 2013 and the second was last year in Colombia.

There are people from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We are trying to develop an academic community.

I’m trying to help to understand if we are different than U.S. writing centers. If we are different, what are our differences?

What is our identity?

NL: I would wonder about that because the way I think about writing centers in this country is they have a kind of reflection of their institution. There are a lot of differences because of that; not all universities are the same but there are patterns. I would wonder if the differences between the other writing centers that you’re looking at in Latin America and what’s going on the U.S. are a function of higher education, what students are being prepared or educated for, who’s being educated, how open access is it, what kind of careers are people being prepared for, or what particular kinds of professional skills or larger kind of general education, things like civics training and be a good citizen and all the rest. I would wonder how the institutional purposes and the purposes of helping

VM: In your experience, Dr. Lerner, or in what you heard when the writing centers were starting, what were the main obstacles that they had to face?

NL: A lot of the early writing centers in this country started as classes, so students would sign up for a class called writing laboratory, so it was part of their regular schedule. And that make sense, it fits in with how we’re thinking of students and they take classes: “ok here’s another class; you’re going to take this one, is going to be called writing laboratory. Well, it’s going to be different than other classes; in that when you’re there during this set time period you’ll be conferencing with someone, you will be getting one to one writing feedback with someone”. In those writing laboratories usually work was assigned, it was relatively unusual in these early ones that students would bring work from other classes, which is how we think of writing centers today. So they come to the writing center and they had a curriculum, they’d say “okay, go write this and then, come talk to me and I’ll give you feedback”, and there were like 40 students in a room doing this. I think that model wasn’t sustainable partially because, I would guess two things: one is it was under the assumption that there’s a sort of generalized writing skills, so a student could do

VM: The main difference is that in Latin America a private college is really different from a public college. In some private colleges they are preparing people who are going to govern. In those cases they care about what the students are doing with writing, and it is so different than in other colleges, even private colleges. In Colombia, at least, there are private colleges preparing students to work in entrepreneurship, to create new business.

Some others are preparing students to work in an industry and there are tensions about humanities in higher education. There are different conceptions about why our students—or we—need writing. In public universities this sense is more critical in that they are preparing for citizenship; it is a broader conception, and in those courses you can see differences. The way that they traditionally are doing it is in regular courses in the first semester and in those courses in public universities they work, for example, writing at the beginning biographies or self biography, with the idea of writing to understand themselves and being able to explain their writing to others. Another example: in my private college we work at the beginning with academic writing, the kind of writing that they need to survive in college. There are different points of view depending on the institution.

NL: That’s an interesting way to think about it; the different types of institutions creating different kinds of needs, and then administratively creating different kinds of writing centers as a result.

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An Interview with Neal Lerner • wonderful things in the confines of that writing laboratory, but then they have to write something in one of their classes; that’s completely different. And they’re struggling; we see that all the time. So, suddenly it’s like “Why can’t they, why didn’t they learn to write in the writing laboratory?” I think that model might not have been particularly effective for that reason and they were always understaffed; it was like one person with 40 students at a time. I studied the writing laboratory of University of Minnesota; that was in this model and started in 1932 and I did some archival work there. And there is a whole series of letters, or writing memos from the writing center director to the head of the program complaining about his workload constantly: “Oh God, I need help.” I think this wasn’t sustainable in that kind of model, so in some ways that’s why it’s changed. The idea of a peer staffed writing center is relatively late in this country, isn’t until the 1960’s when peer tutoring really took off. Once that happened, and then the labor issues were worked out, because suddenly there’s a lot of cheap labor.

VM: Do you think that this improved the writing center services, when they started with peer tutoring?

NL: I do. I think there’s so much value in peer-topeer collaboration that only happens in peer-to-peer collaboration. That’s not simply about writing, that’s about institutional and cultural knowledge and all kinds of other things. That’s really valuable; that’s not going to happen otherwise. I think that really was a key moment in writing centers in this country. So, how common is that in the Latin American writing centers?

VM: Most of the writing centers work with peer tutoring. I just know one writing center working with faculty as tutors, but the rest of them are using peer tutoring. What are the main obstacles with writing centers in order to pay attention to that, and learn about the other’s experiences?

NL: One of the things that I’ve read about, looking at historically, are issues around space, an adequate or constant space.

VM: Is this the main obstacle right now for our writing centers?

NL: It’s amazing. There are others, but it’s hard to understand in a way. If you think, “Great, we need students to eat, so let’s build a cafeteria”; “We need a library, so let’s build a library”— why not build a writing center? Why does it not occur to people to do that?

VM: Maybe for these reasons some of those writing centers are moving to learning centers—because of the space, because they need other conditions to work in. Let’s talk about IWCA, which was at the beginning NWCA. What were the main

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changes that happened in writing centers when they created this association? How this association improved support? Were there any changes when IWCA or NWCA started?

NL: I wasn’t there at the start; I’m not that old.

Joyce Kinkead wrote an article, so I think that in the same way that your network is playing a role, IWCA played a similar role.2 It gave people who are doing some kind of writing center- related work opportunities to have conversations to learn from each other. This is the thing that has always been hard for me to know, and I’ve been part of the IWCA, first NWCA. I was treasurer twice, so I have felt a commitment to the professional organization. It’s always hard to know if it matters to anyone outside of the people who are members, so in other words, does my institution care about that professional organization? And I never know the answer to that. One example of that is there has been a conversation, over many years now, about whether the IWCA should add some sort of certification process that a writing center can apply to be certified by the professional organization. One of the arguments for that has been that it will give some credibility with deans or provost or whatever, and I’m truthfully skeptical. I know lots of deans, provosts, and chairs, and I’m not sure if they’re going to be impressed by such things. I don’t think it hurts, but it’s a lot of pieces to put in place for that particular function. It’s not the same way that some professional organizations for other fields play certain kinds of roles, where they certify professionals and you can’t practice unless you are certified, such as doctors and lawyers or teachers. I think the professionalization has done lots of good things and continues to do lots of good things, and can drive conversations in certain ways. I think lots of the current movements around research are driven in many ways by the professional organization and the journals, which are part of the professional organization, but I’m still trying to figure out what all of the benefits potentially are and how best to take advantage of them.

VM: How does a writing center benefit from becoming part of IWCA? Are there any benefits to staying separate? I think that when you become part of one of these organizations you can be part of the conversation, and also you can interact in the conferences and learn a lot from those.

NL: I agree. One thing that you said made me think of it. When I was treasurer I used to get this question all the time. IWCA has members, individuals, writing center directors or tutors, but I used to get asked: can my writing center itself be a member? And it’s not really set up for that; it has to be talking to a person so how the writing center itself might benefit, I think it’s a really interesting question. I don’t think it’s

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An Interview with Neal Lerner • really set up to do that; it’s set up to respond to what individuals needs are rather than kind of collective needs. I don’t know what it would look like, if for the centers as a whole, but it would be interesting to think about what that might look like, but I certainly agree, the conference, running a conference has been the best thing that IWCA has done.

VM: Something that I’m asking in this moment is about the ethos of writing centers, because there had been some discussions with my colleagues about whether we are servers or scholars. In some cases we are known in our college because we offer workshops to serve other classes and do all the administrative work as directors, but our academic work, as faculty members, is not as well known. What can we do about this perception that we are a service unit rather than academics?

NL: That’s definitely been the tension forever in U.S. writing centers, and since I can’t resolve it, I don’t have an easy answer. As you mentioned about doing workshops, almost always when I do workshops I try to include some content that comes from research about how students learn to write or from what we know or even if it’s my own research; and that’s my attempt to say, “Well, there’s an intellectual foundation for what we’re talking about here.” So, what I want do is, I don’t know how effective that is, but it’s my attempt to kind of bring those two worlds together, which sometimes do seem really separated.

VM: What do you think is the role of research in a writing center?

NL: I think you’ll agree that the function of doing research in some sense is to create new knowledge about what we are curious about, what we need to know. It gives us certain kinds of institutional standing.

Sometimes we have to do it to get tenure and promotion, but it also informs practices. I think that writing center research is especially important because of the ways we need to understand what it is we’re doing. Do we know why the model of one-to-one tutoring is most effective or why peer tutors? The whole use of peer tutors really started with a much more theoretical foundation, and that led to practice.

The theory really drove the practice, I think in that case, with Ken Bruffee’s work. I think they’re inseparable, but I do agree that sometimes it seems like we’re living in two different worlds, whether a research world and then a kind of service world. I know some people feel terrible about being in a position of having to be a service unit and that service equals servitude.

I’ve never quite felt that way; I don’t know why that is because it is a service, in a sense. I think of it like community service. So, it’s about the connotation of

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the word, and I believe deeply in community service, so if that is what we’re doing, what’s wrong with that?

VM: I think this depends on the writing center director.

NL: Yes, and I definitely understand that in the three-part teaching, service, and scholarship, that faculty are responsible for, service is the lowest status in every institution I’ve been part of. And my job is an administrator is part of service, and it immediately carries the lowest status as a result, and it takes the most amount of my time, too. I’m being naive about my reclamation of it because I understand what the argument is.

VM: I think this is why it’s so important for writing centers directors to have some kind of background in administrative skills, because you are administering a program, a center, and you are working with people who you are in charge of, and you have to manage budgets. Sometimes you have a lot of things that as a faculty member you don’t know how to deal with.

NL: That’s true. I would add that is not just administrative skills, but leadership skills. Leadership because writing center directors have opportunities to be leaders at their institutions, in ways that are around the teaching of writing, but it can be others. Usually there are many writing center directors who go on to become deans and provosts in upper administration, because they have those skills and they were successful in the writing center because of those skills. There’re a lot of administrative roles, so I think it’s important to cultivate those kinds of leadership roles, and I don’t mean to leave the writing center, but leading through the writing center.

VM: In this sense, Dr. Lerner, what do you think would be the most desirable preparation to become a writing center director? In an ideal world, what would be desirable?

NL: I think a kind of apprenticeship or mentoring program is really important. So, for instance, at my institution the writing center director has an assistant director for a year. The assistant director is a graduate student in our English Ph.D. program who plays that role, and it turns over every year. So lots of people will get that opportunity and that person gets great training as a writing center director, because he or she is dealing with lots of the day-to-day things. That’s one way, but even when I was a graduate student and tutoring in a writing center that was not part of the English department, I was able to be on the search committee to hire new tutors, so those aspects that are apart from one-to-one tutoring, those aspects of administration, getting experience and practice and doing those under some guidance, I think they’re really essential. Some places are creating courses and that’s great if that

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An Interview with Neal Lerner • works, if there’s enough interest. The ability to get onthe-job experience without being thrust into the role, I think it’s really important. If someone is taking classes that are about writing program administration, I would hope those classes would include something specific to the writing center and not about writing programs generally, because there definitely are specific needs within writing centers.

Notes 1. See The National Census of Writing, http://writingcensus.swarthmore.edu.

2. The article in question is J.A. Kinkead’s “The National Writing Centers Association as Mooring: A personal History of the First Decade.” from The Writing Center Journal vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 131-143.

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MINDFULNESS IN THE WRITING CENTER: A TOTAL ENCOUNTER Elizabeth Mack Metropolitan Community College emack@mccneb.edu Abstract The use of mindfulness or contemplative-based approaches has escalated across many sectors and has been the subject of increasing research interest, so it’s not surprising it is now finding its way into education. This paper reports some key insights gained from a quarter-long mindfulness project implemented over eight weeks in a large community college writing center in Omaha, Nebraska. This paper will describe the initial professional development day when the writing center consultants learned about the pedagogical and theoretical value of mindfulness and its relevance to higher education. This paper will then present the quarter-long project, during which the theories behind mindfulness were put into daily practice in the writing center. Writing center consultants were asked to take part in weekly mindfulness exercises both in the writing center and at home. Questionnaires were administered by the Writing Center Coordinator to collect anonymous consultant feedback each week, in addition to a final questionnaire to measure the project’s effectiveness. This cowritten paper will describe each phase of the project from both the Writing Center Coordinator and the consultant perspectives. The findings of this project have led the Coordinator to incorporate a mindfulness-based foundation into their Writing Center philosophy and enforced their commitment to student-driven pedagogy.

The use of mindfulness or contemplative-based approaches has escalated across many sectors since its formal introduction into a medical setting in the 1970s

by Jon Kabat-Zinn. As reported in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, members of Congress, large companies such as General Mills and Google, athletic teams including the Seattle Seahawks, and the U.S. military are among the many diverse contexts now engaging in formal mindfulness practices. And “the body of scientific research illustrating the positive effects of mindfulness training on mental health and well-being—at the level of the brain as well as at the level of behavior—grows steadily more wellestablished: It improves attention, reduces stress, and results in better emotional regulation and an improved capacity for compassion and empathy” (Davis). Thus, it’s not surprising it is now finding its way into education as well. According to Deborah Schoeberlein, “Master teachers are mindful teachers, aware of themselves and attuned to their students” (I). Since the first significant move toward using mindfulness in schools in the UK in 2007, several programs have been developed to shape the mindfulness-in-education movement. Furthermore, Oxford researchers in 2015 “announced plans to launch a large-scale, seven-year, $10 million study on mindfulness in education next year” (Davis). There is no denying the new interest in

Katie Hupp Metropolitan Community College kehupp@mccneb.edu and growing momentum of this centuries-old Buddhist practice.

As educators and consultants, in the spirit of John Dewey, we are always searching for new ways to reach our students and to bring new life to old practices. As a result, unlike some critics of the movement, we do not consider mindfulness an outdated concept. This article discusses our writing center’s efforts to join the mindfulness-in-education movement.

KATIE: The Retreat As Writing Center Coordinator, I plan an annual retreat designed as professional development regarding a topic that supports our democratic mission. The topic for a recent retreat, Mindfulness in the Writing Center, had been brewing since the previous year’s session on The Importance of Making Ourselves Vulnerable as Consultants. Much good discussion ensued from a prompt that asked consultants to respond to Buddhist scholar Barbara O’Brien’s quote: “To be mindful is to be fully present, not lost in daydreams, anticipation, indulgences, or worry.” The value of this sort of focus when working one-on-one with a student was clear to us all, but we also acknowledged the difficulty of making that happen given the many dynamics that contribute to a consultation, including the pressures of time, stress, and grades to name a few. Thus, as has been the case with most of our retreats, the topic for the next year’s gathering was born.

During that year, I enrolled in a basic mindfulness class. Our first day, the instructor introduced the concept by quoting Jon Kabat-Zinn, who said mindfulness is “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding experience moment to moment” (145). I learned quickly how challenging this can be even when sitting for meditation, without a student and a paper or any other task before me. I devoured all of the assigned readings for the class again only to discover that in my quest to understand how to “be present,” I was anywhere and everywhere but in the moment.

Grasping for some tangible future (what I could check off my to-do list after I finished reading). Dwelling on some past misstep (what I forgot to do before I came to class). Becoming aware of the fact that I was utterly

Mindfulness in the Writing Center • 10 distracted in my determination to be present and to discover the means to being present was an eyeopener. I realized that incorporating mindfulness into our daily and writing center lives would need to be a deliberate exercise. While I found no guidelines for how to do this in writing centers, the research in education helped me conceive of how to make mindfulness part of our pedagogy. “Mindful teaching…,” contend Andrea Marie Hyde and James G. LaPrad, “involves attending to the present moment, including the environment, the participants (teachers, students, authors), and the content as it is variously located in a swirl of interdisciplinary fields” (7-8).

Furthermore, “this practice requires (self-) awareness and (self-) reflection, including an awareness of being situated in a barrage of overlapping contexts, from the geographic to the sociocultural” (8). I began to understand the elements needed to enact the mindful approach that made good sense to us on retreat day.

Shortly thereafter, I recruited Elizabeth, one of our consultants who helped plan both retreats, to collaborate with me in creating a means by which we could engage in this self-awareness and self-reflection.

In the remainder of this article, Elizabeth and I will describe the planning and execution of and insights gained from the project—I from the administrator’s perspective, sharing what we did and the reasoning behind it, and Elizabeth, from the consultant’s perspective, explaining how it all was received.

Retreat participation was not mandatory, so the attendees were there by choice. I went into the day knowing that “Although mindfulness meditation has historical roots in Buddhist practice, teachers of mindfulness in the West have adapted traditional mindful awareness practices into a secular discipline for the psychological and medical benefits they provide” (Meiklejohn et al. 292). I made clear this was not an attempt to impose a belief system, nor an effort to advance or obstruct any religious beliefs, but to support the well-being of students and our staff, as well as develop an attitude of inquiry. Nonetheless, my first priority on retreat day was bringing the group on board with a topic that may appear to some as nonacademic or even frivolous. Though perhaps risky, instead of introducing the topic with words and theory, this group’s usual means of understanding, I opted for immersion. First, Elizabeth led us in a quick exercise called a “Mind Dump,” which asked retreat participants to write all that had stressed them out already that morning. Then, she ceremoniously led the group outside to a fire pit into which we were asked to throw our list of stressors. Immediately following, another consultant guided us through a Body Scan exercise, which involved closing our eyes and

becoming fully aware of every inch of our bodies, starting from our toes and moving to our heads. I peeked to see how the group was responding. Most became visibly more relaxed as the exercise unfolded.

However, a few fidgeted as they glanced furtively around the room. Coming to a quiet like this, especially in a work setting, was clearly an unnatural, uncomfortable experience for some.

Those who were comfortable seemed curious, while those few who were not seemed a little suspicious. For both groups, the next segment of the retreat was designed to provide answers. A doctoral student researching the integration of mindfulness and contemplative practices into college classrooms spoke on what mindfulness is, why it is beneficial, and how we can practice it. Her explanation focused on the utility of mindfulness for both students and teachers given the pressures and distractions of the modern world. “It is a discipline,” she said, that is “intentional.

It’s about disregarding the distractions and being prepared for whatever crosses our path.” She emphasized the pedagogical and theoretical values of what she called “learning through refined attention,” dispelling the common belief that anything in the realm of meditation is only a religious practice, therefore irrelevant to higher education. She invoked the Freirean logic that deepening our kindness and compassion through mindfulness creates a practice of nonjudgmental awareness that is in line with our writing center mission. She then introduced us to research of the neurophysiological basis for mindfulness practices, which included research showing how a practice of mindfulness helps develop effective emotion regulation in the brain, reduces anxiety, decreases reaction to distraction, increases memory capacity, and improves learning (Jha et al., Zeidan et al.).

After this taste of both practice and theory, I distributed an individual writing exercise with questions about common scenarios (such as: Have you ever left a writing center shift feeling emotionally drained or mentally stressed? Have you ever experienced a feeling of dread at the beginning of a shift after looking at the appointment book?

Have you ever found it difficult to detach yourself from an anticipated outcome with a student?) designed to bring to the surface writing center moments that might have played out differently if we were practicing mindfulness.

Next, without sharing or discussing our responses, a local meditation teacher led us in a formal meditation. His goal was “to illustrate how mindfulness as a practice reveals greater self-acceptance, resiliency, and the capacity for an engaged and discerning perspective, which promotes loving-kindness, compassion, and generosity.” Sitting down to a new

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Mindfulness in the Writing Center • 11 student with a different assignment and various concerns each half-hour in a writing center shift takes patience and focus. It requires paying attention to the task and to the student in front of you, not worrying about how it went with this student the last time you met or how many more appointments you have to go before your shift ends. As Nel Noddings writes, “I don’t need to establish a lasting, time-consuming personal relationship with every student. What I must do is to be totally and nonselectively present to the student—to each student—as he addresses me. The time interval may be brief but the encounter is total” (180). After the meditation, we talked about how our interactions with a particular student might have conjured up different images and memories had we treated our shared moment with him/her as if the encounter were total. It was exciting to sense the sort of change we are capable of making by being intentional and present. But, honestly, it seemed like a difficult thing to practice.

In the following weeks, I could sense the positive energy from the retreat day fading. Admitting the difficulty of remembering to be mindful within the daily routine, I decided to launch a project for the rest of the quarter that involved following weekly prompts.

I wanted to challenge consultants to think more deeply about their writing center practices and realized that to give it substance, we needed to work on being mindful all day, not just at work; so each week involved one exercise to complete in the writing center and another to do at home, and, again, their participation was voluntary and anonymous. The exercises all aimed to inform the consultants’ philosophical approaches to consultations. The actual exchange wasn’t compromised or altered in any way, so getting permission from students wasn’t necessary.

ELIZABETH: Consultant Perspective When Katie announced the topic for this year’s retreat, I had a basic understanding of mindfulness although I had never followed through with it as a daily practice.

At the retreat, we had a long discussion about the ways we let certain scenarios inherent to our writing center work negatively affect us. Many of my colleagues admitted to moving from location to location (we maintain five centers in the community) to avoid certain demanding students. Still others said they often become emotionally involved with students, leading to increased stress. Sometimes the student’s topic is so personal that it’s impossible not to become emotionally involved. It’s a type of vocation that is often difficult to leave at work. After the retreat, I was

eager to take what I had learned back to the Writing Center and incorporate a more mindful approach— non-judging, patient, thoughtful responses—into my consultations. Those good intentions soon met with reality, and my best mindful intentions fell by the wayside, so I welcomed Katie’s idea of a focused effort to make mindfulness a regular practice. She distributed weekly exercises and follow-up surveys to the staff, and I chose to participate.1 To illustrate the project and its level of effectiveness, I will describe my week-by-week experiences with the exercises.

Week One For the first week’s exercise, we were to allow an extra minute or two after viewing the online schedule to focus on our next appointment, to try to avoid concerns about past appointments and approach each consultation with a clear focus and attention to each student. For my first appointment, I made a conscious effort to honor the student’s stated consultation request: “Fix grammar and punctuation.” Normally, I might bristle at this request, but when the student was seated, I said, “I see you are concerned about grammar and punctuation in this essay. Can I also offer to look at the global concerns as well?” Rather than telling her what we do not do, I framed my response in a positive way, and it seemed to put her at ease and she became receptive to my counsel.

For the home exercise, we were to sit and do nothing, only notice our breathing for five minutes each day. It was a challenge to do nothing, even for five minutes, but when I did, I noticed I was much more relaxed and less stressed.

Week Two This week’s exercise asked us to limit our 30minute consultations to 25 minutes and take the extra 5 to re-center ourselves in quiet reflection. I had a student who wanted help with a vocabulary assignment. As it turned out, it was a take-home quiz, and she wanted me to answer the questions for her.

When I asked if she had read the assignment, she said no. I felt taken advantage of and resentful. After she left, I had another appointment immediately but took time to excuse myself to take a few breaths so as not to carry my negative feelings into the next meeting.

Taking a break, even for five minutes, helped me avoid any negative carry-over from the previous student. It felt odd stepping away early, but it greatly improved the quality of my consultations.

For the home exercise, we were to “put space between things” and avoid rushing from one thing to the next. Although we were directed to schedule extra time on the calendar to make it a priority, it wasn’t

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Mindfulness in the Writing Center • 12 easy. When I did take the time to re-center myself instead of scurrying around, I noticed a marked difference in my mood.

Week Three This week we were to slow down and experience – rather than just get through or endure – a consultation by taking a few moments to experience the sensory details of the room. Slowing down to observe my surroundings improved my patience with students.

One particular student, who is demanding and sometimes verbally combative, came in. Usually, he causes me to tense up. During the day I had practiced focusing on the sensory details of my surroundings, so when this student came, I felt a sense of calm that I hadn’t experienced before when working with him.

Perhaps by focusing on external details, I was able to let go of my own internal anxiety.

For the home exercise, we were told to “get in touch with your senses.” When I paused to notice things I would never normally take notice of, such as the temperature of my skin or background noises, I felt a growing calmness that improved my ability to concentrate. I have noticed that carrying over the mindfulness practices to home has greatly reduced my anxiety level.

Week Four For this week’s exercise, we were instructed to pause at the end of each paragraph during our consultations, if only for a few seconds, to refocus. I noticed that when I paused while reading a paper with students, they would speak to fill the silence. A few students interpreted my pause as an indication that they had done something wrong in their paper.

However, as I remained silent, I noticed students were taking ownership of their paper by making revisions independently of my feedback.

For our home exercise, we were to take mindful pauses, focusing on our breath, while driving or doing other tasks. I noticed I felt much less rushed and more calm than I normally would.

Week Five I was skeptical when I saw this week’s exercise. We were to practice mindful “loving kindness,” sending loving, positive thoughts to each student, even as far as thinking, “I love you.” I failed miserably. After an extremely difficult week, I wasn’t much in the mood to send loving thoughts to some demanding students. But I suppose it did help me to begin each consultation with a positive frame of mind.

The home exercise instructed us to set an intention for the day and “make an effort [each morning] to

transition from sleep to conscious awareness by greeting the day with a sense of gratitude.” The more I practiced it, the less the day’s chaos negatively impacted me.

Week Six This week we had the freedom to set our own intentions both at work and at home. I tried to focus on being more patient with students. I reminded myself throughout the day how I might best handle stressful situations or disruptive behavior so I could better compartmentalize my reaction. I definitely noticed that I handled difficult students with more compassion and patience.

Week Seven This week, in a deliberate effort to avoid judgment, we were to let go of our assumptions of what we felt the students needed. This was challenging! Early in the week, a student came in upset with his instructor’s response to his draft, as he felt he had done what the assignment required. After looking it over, I thoughtfully explained the instructor’s comments. He became agitated. I paused, reframed my response, and asked questions to make sure he knew I heard him and understood his needs. I stepped back to let him find his own way instead of imposing my opinion on what he needed to do. He was frustrated and upset that so much revision needed to be done, but as I gave him the room to vent his anger and frustration in a safe place, he calmed down.

For the home exercise, we were to put our total focus on meals, bringing awareness to each bite, noticing the texture, flavor, and color of each morsel.

This helped me slow down and become more aware of something that I regularly do without a thought.

Week Eight For the final week, we were to consider how our posture and body language nonverbally communicate with students. I had an interesting consultation with a student who clearly wasn’t invested in his work. He’d seemed to expect me to simply correct his paper for him, slouching down in his chair with arms crossed. I started the appointment with a straight back, leaning forward, but when I realized he intended to remain slouched, I sat back too. Once he saw me mirroring him, he sat up and became more engaged. I remained leaning back to indicate I was willing to help from afar, but that he had to take responsibility.

At home, we were asked to try a mindful walking exercise. Walking with an awareness of my body, my movements, and the feel of the ground beneath my

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Mindfulness in the Writing Center • 13 feet helped me to focus on my body and how it nonverbally communicates to others.

KATIE: Final Thoughts

of mindfulness in their Writing Center work had longlasting consequences: •

At the conclusion of the project, 100 percent of the consultants who participated in the poll claimed that incorporating mindfulness practices into the writing center had a positive effect on student consultations, at least from their perspectives, which was the only focus for this study. Their responses confirm the research that contends “teachers may derive benefit from learning and practicing mindfulness techniques” (Flook et al. 182).

Some of the benefits experienced include: Not reacting “I’ve gained skills in not allowing a student’s problem to become my problem, and I’ve improved my ability to explain the situation as I see it in a calm, constructive manner.”

Staying focused “I enjoy my job more and am much better at consulting when I focus on the student and the job instead of on everything else that’s going on in my life.”

Listening “I’m less interested in achieving a result than in listening and better understanding the student.”

“I wasn’t trying to anticipate what clients might need, so I became a better listener.”

Being more patient “Waiting 3-5 extra seconds not only calms me and shows me a different perspective, but it also lets the students come up with answers themselves.”

Admittedly, consultants acknowledged that some exercises were more effective than others, and some home exercises transferred to their writing center work better than others; some owned up to forgetting all about mindfulness once their consultee arrived. And in the year that has passed since the formal mindfulness project, many consultants have shared a writing center exchange that went well (or better than expected) because they remembered to put space between appointments or re-focused their energy before each consultation. A follow-up questionnaire one-year later asked consultants to reflect on their Writing Center interactions with students since the original eight-week mindfulness project to gauge if the deliberate practice

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“Two things have stayed with me: I feel I’m better able to focus my thoughts; and it’s helped me be aware of my body language, both on and off work. I consider much more how my physical presence can speak volumes.”

“I am definitely more aware and conscious of my surroundings, my situation, and myself. That keen awareness allows me to have more control over how I react in stressful situations.”

“The focused breathing techniques I learned helped me to feel more in control and not get too overwhelmed. I’m much more patient in all areas of my life.”

“I think I am better able to provide a sense of comfort, ease, and confidence to those I work with.”

“If I gave a new writing center consultant one piece of advice about being mindful, I would say the job can be surprisingly stressful, but by practicing even one mindfulness technique, you are arming yourself with the awareness and control to help you navigate these issues.”

Mindfulness as a deliberate practice has found its way into our philosophy and way of being in the writing center on a larger scale as well. I have introduced the concept to every new hire since this study and always promote mindfulness as a way of dealing with difficult and disruptive students in a healthy way. In the moment, this means being present and listening rather than reacting and judging. Before and after these consultations, being mindful involves paying thoughtful attention to understanding and articulating the student’s needs, and this practice was implemented in the recent retooling of WCOnline, which we use to gather and share information. We changed the questions we ask students in both the registration and appointment fields to more directly ask them to articulate their strengths and weaknesses as writers. We do our best to listen more to what they are saying here than imposing what we think once we read their papers. So far, this act of deliberately staying in the moment rather than recalling the last time we worked with the same student or assignment has been successful. Consultants admit that consciously choosing to read what the student has identified as his/her needs as a launching point for the consultation

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Mindfulness in the Writing Center • 14 has provided both a better approach and a good reminder to keep our commitment to student-driven pedagogy.

We have also added space on our online report form to share information between consultants. The goal of this section is specifically to help us handle potentially difficult situations in a calm, non-reactive way. We are in the third quarter with this new system, and judging by this comment from one consultant to another, it is working: “Thanks for providing such helpful comments in the client report form field for ‘any useful information for future consultations.’

You left some insight into the student’s outlook, which made me all the more determined (and gave me guidance) to help me in my consultation with her. I know now that I need to proceed with greatest sensitivity to this student’s feelings.”

Overall, the benefits of incorporating a mindfulness-based practice are two-fold: the students receive focused attention and assistance, and consultants experience reduced stress and anxiety.

Thus, the quality of the interaction necessarily improves. We continue to seek new ways to practice mindfulness every day. Our time with students may be brief, but we owe it to them to take whatever measures possible to be completely present in that moment.

Learning to be self-aware and self-reflective is a good start.

Cognitive Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 7, 2007, pp. 109-119.

Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Full Catastrophe Living. Piatkus, 1990.

Meiklejohn, John, et al. “Integrating Mindfulness Training into K-12 Education: Fostering the Resilience of Teacher and Students.” Mindfulness, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 291-307.

Noddings, Nel. Caring. University of California P, 1984.

O’Brien, Barbara. “Right Mindfulness: A Foundation of Buddhist Practice.” ThoughtCo: Right Mindfulness, 14 Dec. 2014, thoughtco.com/right-mindfulness450070.

Schoeberlein, Deborah, and Suki Sheth. Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything. Wisdom P, 2009.

Zeidan, F., et al. “Mindfulness Meditation Improves Cognition: Evidence of Brief Mental Training.”

Conscious Cognition, vol. 19 no. 2, 2010, pp. 597-605.

Notes 1. Weekly mindfulness exercises can be found at MCC Writing Center Faculty Resource page: http://resource.mccneb.edu/writingcenter/facresourc es.html.

Works Cited Davis, Lauren Cassani. “When Mindfulness Meets the Classroom.” The Atlantic, 31 Aug. 2015, theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/mind fulness-education-schools-meditation/402469/.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. The Free Press, 1944.

Flook, Lisa, et al. “Mindfulness for Teachers: A Pilot Study to Assess Effects on Stress, Burnout, and Teaching Efficacy.” Mind, Brain, and Education, vol.

7, no. 3, 2013, pp. 182-195.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

Hyde, Andrea Marie, and James G. LaPrad.

“Mindfulness, Democracy, and Education.”

Democracy & Education, vol. 2, 2015, pp. 1-12.

Jha, A.P., Krompinger, J., & Baime, M.J. “Mindfulness Training Modifies Subsystems of Attention.”

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 17, No 2 (2017)

KAIROTIC SITUATIONS: A SPATIAL RETHINKING OF THE BURKEAN PARLOR IN THE WRITING CENTER Elizabeth Busekrus Missouri Baptist University elizabeth.busekrus@mobap.edu Abstract The Burkean parlor has been integrated into the lore of writing centers, showcasing how writing centers have both conversational and collaborative elements. However, the ease for students to enter into the academic conversation is not as simple as this metaphor suggests. To rethink this concept, kairos, or the opportune moment, must be considered. This article will investigate kairos as spatial and how that conceptualization can deepen the Burkean parlor and the conversations within it. Breaking down the Burkean parlor into three stages—questions, metacognition, and choices—can benefit the practicality of the tutoring session. Kairos complicates each of these three points of the student writer’s integration into the conversation. The creation of kairos depends upon the student and tutor being mindful of these conscious and unconscious interactions and understanding how to most effectively disrupt the spatial boundaries of the tutoring session. Connecting kairos into the Burkean parlor metaphor differentiates the perspective of the tutoring session, encouraging both student and tutor to become more aware of the spatiality of tutoring and to redefine these boundaries.

“Imagine that you enter a parlor…” begins Kenneth Burke as he describes his parlor metaphor for academic conversation (Burke 110-111). This metaphor pivots around the ongoing nature of dialogue. For many scholars, the Burkean parlor constitutes a movement beyond the writing itself and into more metaphysical aspects—definition of identity for the writer, expansion of knowledge in a discipline, and sharing of thoughts within a discourse community.

Andrea Lunsford paired the parlor with collaboration, showing how the writing center as Burkean parlor results in critical, more nonconcrete thinking (3-4).

These concepts define the Burkean parlor as a means of integrating with a discourse community or discipline of study. Traditionally, the Burkean parlor identifies conversation within this structured process: enter the room, listen, and plunge into discussion. This lore has guided my writing lab, as well as other labs and centers worldwide.

Readers will find that the Burkean parlor is not the main character in our story, though; this article is a story about the not-often-discussed theory of kairos. I will use this concept to complicate the lore-centric Burkean metaphor. Those unfamiliar with kairos, by the end of this article, will understand this concept and the benefit it enacts as a lens to our tutoring narratives and conversations. James Kinneavy defines kairos as “the right or opportune time to do something, or right measure in doing something” (80). When is the right

time to ask a question? To embrace the silence? To tell the student what to do? How can we know when the “right time” and “right place” is for an action? How do we create the circumstances to lead to these moments?

Lunsford uses a note from one of her students to describe the Burkean Parlor Center: a place where “we are all making and remaking our knowing and ourselves with each other every day” (5). Within what Lunsford calls a collaborative environment, the tutor can model, tell, teach, inquire, and so forth, and out of this negotiation, the kairotic moment is constructed.

Reflecting on this process, Carl Glover states: “Tutors must make an immediate judgment concerning how best to help their clients. In a sense, they must find the kairos point of the tutoring session, which requires a kind of double vision that looks for a balance between the abilities of the client and the demands of the paper” (159). Tutors must identify what to say and when (and sometimes not to say anything). This knowledge comes from paying attention to the student’s verbal and nonverbal language and level of engagement. As tutors, we are taught flexibility, but kairos invokes more awareness to reach the “light bulb” moment that Glover references.

Our sessions are bound by chronos—a chronological sense of time, but our insights are wrapped in kairos—the moment. Tim Taylor et al. further highlight kairos in the writing center. Students come to the writing center “in the middle” of writing or thinking about their writing, and the conflicts in their thought process set the foreground for kairos.

These tensions are depicted within the experiences, mindset, and perceptions of the student. Excavating these points involves student and tutor surfacing aspects of their identity, thus creating a conversation of kairotic potential. Focusing on kairos encourages writer and tutor “to play with language, play with ideas, and play with details as they develop a sense of themselves as writers and broaden their appreciation of the possibilities inherent in a piece of writing” (Taylor et al.). Kairos comprises an intimate understanding of the situation and a reflection of choices, boundaries, and roles for student and tutor.

Kairotic Situations • 16 How Does Spatiality Connect with Kairos?

Each situation engages in spatiality to some extent.

While the student and tutor may be present at one physical location, the conversation leads across many dimensions and planes of thinking. This traversing of boundaries illustrates how crucial kairos is as a spatial concept. An initial definition of kairos lies in Homer’s Iliad, where kairos is positioned as “a critical, fatal spot on the body” (Hawhee, Bodily Arts 65). In the tutoring session, finding “[this] critical, fatal spot” means awareness of what is and is not a part of this identifying location. As time has passed, a shift occurred to focus on kairos as a moment rather than a place. Even Glover and Taylor et al. emphasize the temporal quality more. Rhetorician Hunter Stephenson explains his rationale for this shift: “While the temporal meaning remains relatively concrete in its connotation, the spatial meaning moves further towards the abstract.

That is, although kairos as ‘time’ refers to a specific moment in which resolution is achieved, kairos as “space” refers to an unspecified location (i.e., an indeterminate location within the universe) at which resolution is achieved” (5). Spatiality is indefinite; with the totality of the student’s experiences and the tutor’s experiences brought into the session, this space must be studied to fully reach kairos and effectively tutor a student beyond the confines of just the writing product. Creating this tension between student and tutor is a significant part of the process because it forces collaborative control on both parties.

Kairos adds value to the writing center and should be used as a lens for the Burkean parlor metaphor.

Using kairos in this way can complicate both concepts and lead to fruitful transformations for writing center work and more effective tutoring practices. In this article, I will unpack a spatial understanding of kairos, which offers a rethinking of the Burkean parlor and a movement of the conversation to a more productive place so that tutors can recognize and create kairotic moments and apply them to the Burkean parlor.

In these Burkean parlor conversations, to develop the student as a writer we must attune ourselves to the right moment to act or say something, but the “where,” or place and space, must be accounted for too. Space is the area of “the other,” which a student has not considered. Place is commonly defined as a geographical space, rich with personal meaning, but places can lead to stagnation if the student does not reflect on the options between these places. Kairos depends on place and space. Dobrin states: “the very idea of space is dependent upon the ‘things’—in this case the practices, the meanings—that occupy the places of those spaces” (17). We must have students recognize and reflect on their places to understand

space. In its historical definition, the spatial aspect is hinted. To know where that critical place on the body is, to know what the “opportune moment” is, I have to develop awareness of the surrounding elements. Nia Klein compares kairos in the writing center to removing training wheels from a child’s bike—a moment of growth and a push for transformation (Taylor et al.). A moment of kairos—in the right place and space—can add more to the conversation.

Where is the Practical in Kairos?

To describe kairos, we must enter this theorydriven Burkean parlor for the first time. The divide between theory and practice in the writing center has long been evident. In Lisa Ede’s “Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers?”, she argues: “As long as thinking and writing are regarded as inherently individual, solitary activities, writing centers can never be viewed as anything more than pedagogical fix-it shops to help those who, for whatever reason, are unable to think and write on their own” (7). Though frank, these words make the call that we need to “fight for the time” to theorize (11). Nearly fifteen years later, John Nordolf asserts much the same idea, encouraging reflection regarding how theory complicates our daily practices.

An example may be beneficial to show kairos in action. Unconfident in all kinds of writing, a student waltzed into the Writing Lab with the belief that his ideas do not matter to others. He had a thesis focused on stereotypes, and our discussion revealed his experiences with stereotypes and views on social media as a portal for furthering this issue. To develop the consciousness about his ideas more, I placed the writing aside and questioned him about how he personally could alleviate the problem. For this tutoring session, I emphasized his voice rather than the essay, which created a tension between his perception of writing (as a flawless work when first delivered) and my action toward his writing. By creating kairos, he was able to give his writing a fuller purpose. The tutor brings these unforeseen spatial elements to the surface, helping students recognize how accessible and durable their writing can be. The tutor must break the tension of these elements to create kairos.

If kairos makes this much of an impact on changing the conversation, it should be recognized.

Without kairos, there will be “little learning and growth for the student as a writer and me as a tutor” (Scott).

The field of composition studies “has consciously attempted to move away from scholarship and pedagogies envisioning a timeless, transcendent, and akairotic or context-less concept of writing and the teaching of writing” (Scott). Context affects what is

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Kairotic Situations • 17 written and what is discussed in the tutoring session.

Rickert describes the relationship kairos positions in the writing process: “The writer is written by the environment, considered as the most singular, concrete moment. . . . in a quite literal sense I must say that I am being written by what I have written” (“In the House of Doing” 920). What was written and said prior to and during the tutoring session continually rewrites the tutor and student, but the student and tutor have the power to code this space, giving it meaning.

By noting what the student thinks and believes through the student’s attitude, talk, writings, and behaviors during the session, I, as the tutor, can start to have a better idea of the student’s places. Kairotic potential can be identified through an unveiling of these places, specifically when: 1. A diversion from the typical session occurs due to the student; 2. The student appears resistant regarding a topic or writing style; and/or 3. The student is narrowly focused on one angle of the writing.

After this initial step of recognizing kairos, a few practical techniques can be brought to the table to further the Burkean parlor, which are highlighted below.

The listening stage: questioning the discourse. A tutoring session starts and ends at certain time stamps, but as Burke notes, “the discussion had begun long before any of them got there” (110). Usually, the person entering into this theoretical parlor does not fully understand the academic dialogue taking place and their part in it. Within the writing center setting, part of this assimilation, this invention of the university to use David Bartholomae’s term, involves using questions as a tool for engagement, dialogue, and guidance.

Thompson and Mackiewicz conducted a study regarding questions in the tutoring session, pointing out that “along with stimulating understanding, questions are vital linguistic components of an educational conversation” (39). Questions provide direction for the tutoring session and for what will be accomplished during that time frame. For writing centers, the Socratic questioning method remains a regularly used tool. Rose et al. state that many studies have been conducted as to the success of Socratic dialogue (55). In this way, “productive questions while using overt participation strategies enhances the cognitive environment in the classroom” (Tienken et al. 32). For students, questions become a way to think and engage in the conversation. Within Thompson and Mackiewicz’s study, questions which established commonality in knowledge between the student and tutor and those which led students toward a specific

path were the most common moves discovered (46).

Looking at this perspective, tutors use questions to assist students in understanding academia and guiding them toward that discourse community.

The goal of the Burkean parlor is to assimilate students into the conversation, but kairos works to disrupt. Within the Burkean parlor, this process is framed as straightforward, a logical step-by-step progression toward understanding the topic and writing at hand. However, the student and tutor must negotiate and surface their different places in the tutoring session. Highlighting these tensions causes students to reflect on their places more and have more meaningful writing, one with more ontic weight.

Within the parlor metaphor, each question adds relevance to the subject at hand; the questions give flow to the conversation and build off one another.

While this process benefits the student writer, kairos gives more depth to questioning. Employing this model is much like bringing the “Trickster” into the picture as questions that may not appear directly connected to the writing assignment. For this mindset, “the possibility of learning and of being transformed by such moments lies in what sense we make of that flash of vision the Trickster moment gives us of ourselves, our convictions about who we are, what the world is and how and why it is just that way” (Geller et al. 30-31). Chaos leads to these insights, a change in the places we know and an investigation of possible spaces to explore. A kairotic question can either start this disruption or highlight a disruption already brought into the session, facilitating a dialogue that expands on the cognitive processes of the student writer.

Disruptions key on students’ practiced places—their worldviews and values, process of writing, and their overall perspective on their essay topic—asking questions that cause students to rethink them.

One such “practiced place” may mean a student’s understanding of the vernacular of a certain field, such as exercise science. Perhaps this student understands the jargon of this discipline and deliberately implements it into a literature review. Without directly intending to, the student forms sentences with confusing meanings. The tutor asks common questions: “What do you mean here?” or “Do you mean x, y, and z?” or “Perhaps x is what you are trying to say.” The student and tutor then dialogue to uncover what the student’s message is. At one point in the conversation, the student remarks, “I have always been taught in research papers to state my opinion and then explain how one of the sources is supporting that claim.” When a student’s comment or reaction appears to diverge slightly from the conversation, the moment is infused with kairotic potential. The tutor can probe

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Kairotic Situations • 18 the student on the reasoning behind this teaching with a question such as “Why do you think you were taught that way?” or a discussion of the impact of this essay structure on the student’s messages. All forms of questioning lock on the disruption and use it as the foundation to move the session in a disruptive, yet mindful direction.

Metacognition: It’s all a game of identity shifts. After some initial questions to be in the Burkean parlor, the novices begin to “put in [their] oar,” gauging “the tenor of the argument” (Burke 110). These individuals integrate more into the community. The writer advances deeper into the scholarly discipline. Each discourse community demonstrates typical knowledge sets, and the novice perhaps mindlessly agrees with what is said, following the constraints of the field.

During one of my writing workshops, students used the following thesis statement template to analyze a short story: “Through literary element 1 and literary element 2, the author argues x about the short story.”

Formulaic thesis statements tend to go unexamined by students. “Through imagery, the author argues about loneliness” was one student’s thesis. He had not imagined anything beyond the template, but he understood the story and the literary analysis format well enough to “put in [his] oar” (Burke 110). Meeting with him one-on-one later, I continued this discussion organically.

When tutoring, we often move within this game, such as in constructing a thesis statement. Plato, in Phaedrus, describes his viewpoint that “writing can only repeat (itself), that it ‘always signifies (semainei) the same’ and it is a ‘game’ (paidia)” (Derrida 65). In contrast, Derrida believes “play is always lost when it seeks salvation in games” (158). Derrida affirms this deconstruction process, showing how the game constricts while play continues to find new ideas. As students gain knowledge about how to construct ideas within academia, they form rules and mindsets, which solidify into places. Demonstrated above in the student’s discourse is this place: the thesis template.

The student may feel disinclined to resist the notion of what to include within the thesis, thinking of this area as common knowledge.

Kairos, however, moves the conversation into a metacognitive state. This process of becoming more metacognitive “includes a variety of self-awareness processes that help learners to plan, monitor, orchestrate, and control their own learning” (Nodoushan 1). Instead of only gaining a breadth of knowledge via the traditional Burkean parlor, metacognition unearths deeper knowledge, causing students to understand their writing, thinking, and learning process more. These moments of tension,

such as in the thesis statement example, when the student only sees one way of understanding a concept, an idea, or a process, are filled with kairos. Metastrategies invoke a reflection on the principles of a process or concept (What are the components of a thesis statement? What does a thesis statement in a literary analysis look like?); the student’s understanding regarding its fit into the big picture (What is the purpose of a thesis statement?); any prior connections the student has had (What have you been taught about thesis statements? What do you believe to be true about them?); and the impact of this process or concept (How does the thesis statement connect to your writing identity?). These are the spaces that are unsaid. Using meta-strategies to highlight these kairotic spaces can cause students to rethink and grow as writers and scholars.

A consideration of the possibilities: A disruption of perceptions. Throughout this process of growth, as the student develops a writing voice and explores more than one angle on a topic and/or within a discipline, this student takes a side regarding what to believe.

Burke shows this segmentation: “Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you” (Burke 110). With kairos, all choices, not only those inherent to the conversation, become options. This collaborative environment signifies resistance because other perspectives are brought to attention. Kairos should function as “a moment of decision that leads to an epistemological transformation that ungrounds old knowledge and discloses new knowledge” (Petruzzi 352). This ungrounding is “situationally contingent” (Covino and Jolliffe 7). If the situation, the tutor, or the writer is unwilling, however, kairos will not happen.

Allowing for openness of collaborative thought allows students to feel more comfortable in sharing their ideas. This vulnerability also presents opportunities for tutors to give students more choices since they may be more willing to listen to a nonjudgmental ear. These choices should disrupt what the student thinks and can be given through discussion, visualization, or a creative writing activity that highlights the multiplicity of perspectives.

Only narrowly focusing on a social convention commonly held by others restricts kairotic invention.

James S. Baumlin shows the kairos struggle in these cases: When successful, kairos undermines prepon by changing the status quo; in contrast, prepon strives to regulate kairos, thereby weakening the latter’s capacities for effecting change. In a sense, kairos and prepon enact a dialectic between freedom and formal restraint; stated rhetorically, kairos and

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Kairotic Situations • 19 prepon pit an individual’s powers of invention against the formidable constraints of social convention and audience expectations. (159) Resisting and working with prepon or decorum, kairos inspires collaboration. First, tutors must note areas where students exhibit narrowness. From that area, tutors can collaborate with students, seeing what their perspective and reasoning is behind this belief or value.

The tutors can then lay out some other options and with students, can view these various choices (spaces which the student perhaps has not thought about) and determine if it would be effective to redefine their places.

Conclusions and Further Implications These acts of reflection disrupt what the student normally thinks (their solidified places). Instead of viewing writing from one narrowed view of reality, the student and tutor can unmask these realities and spaces around the writing, leading to kairos. Scot Barnett reiterates this ideology through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s theories, discussing the impossibility of conceptualizing place in writing due to the “unclaimed experiences” that occur below “the threshold of conscious awareness.”(page number needed) Nuances of space and place become created when we explore other identities. When tutoring those in the writing center can use examples from the student’s essay and dialogue with the student, asking questions that break down the student’s cultural, ethical, personal, and topical (in terms of the writing assignment) places and require them to look at the space of “the other.” Kairos occurs when students become more aware of what they think and why, considering other choices.

Scott positions this idea of choice in his theoretical underpinning of kairos, using Kinneavy’s categories of kairos to understand how this concept works in writing programs: epistemological, ethical, social, rhetorical, and aesthetic. In illustrating the various aspects of kairos, he claims: “The Writing Center impacts and is impacted by the community, my discipline, and various political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.” In this way, Scott encourages writing center practitioners to reflect on writing programs and assessment with these shades of kairos in mind. While Scott uses kairos as applicable in a larger context, his call to action asserts the necessity of kairos in the writing center and provides an approach to tutoring.

Both Scott and Kinneavy construct a comprehensive picture of kairos except for the exclusion of one category: ontological or the nature of being. For something to have ontic weight, it must be

analyzed according to four categories: “coherence, durability, causal efficacy, and accessibility” (Davis 24).

In the tutoring session, Kinneavy’s categories and this conception of “ontic weight” become more apparent.

For the student who wrote about stereotypes, he did not see the ontic weight of his writing, at first. To him, the grade and his grammar marked the worth of his ideas. By keying on the impact of stereotypes in his life and in others and making the learning experience authentic, he addressed his biases, his conception of ignorance and education, and his perspective on his writing. He had not considered these spaces before, and his awareness and confrontation of these tensions provided a kairotic opportunity. We embraced kairos, giving him the opportunity to reflect and see the ontic weight of his writing more clearly.

Pairing this theoretical lens with the Burkean parlor creates more complexities and provides more of an understanding of what kairos can do in the writing center. We have to learn to identify kairotic potential so that we can learn more, grow more, and further our understanding of ourselves and the world, and of our writing. Hawhee describes kairos as an unpredictable, surprising force, one whose movements nobody can forecast in advance (Bodily Arts 70). By recognizing kairos in the moments when the student diverges from the conversation or exhibits a narrowed conception, the tutor and student can use questioning techniques, metacognition, and collaboration to rethink perceptions and behaviors. Playing this game of kairos transforms the space-place boundaries of the writing center, and ultimately, the writing, the tutor, and the student, disrupting the norm and leading to the invention of something new.

Works Cited Barnett, Scot. “Psychogeographies of Writing: Ma(r)king Space at the Limits of Representation.”

Kairos, vol. 16, no. 3, Summer 2012, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.3/topoi/ barnett/index.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2013.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.”

Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 5, no. 1, 1986, pp. 4-23, https://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v5n1/bartholomae .pdf. Accessed 25 Mar. 2016.

Baumlin, James S. “Ciceronian Decorum and the Temporalities of Renaissance Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, edited by Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, State University of New York Press, 2002, pp. 138164.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form.

University of California Press, 1941.

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Kairotic Situations • 20 Covino, William A., and David A. Jolliffe, editors.

Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Allyn and Bacon, 1995.

Davis, John Jefferson. Worship and the Reality of God: An Evangelical Theology of Real Presence. InterVarsity Press, 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Dobrin, Sidney I. “The Occupation of Composition.”

The Locations of Composition, edited by Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. State University of New York Press, 2007, pp. 15-35.

Ede, Lisa. “Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers?” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 1989, pp. 3-13, http://casebuilder.rhet.ualr.edu/ wcrp/publications/wcj/wcj9.2/WCJ9.2_Ede.pdf.

Accessed 11 Feb. 2017.

Geller, Anne Ellen, et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Utah State University Press, 2007.

Glover, Carl. “Kairos and the Writing Center: Modern Perspectives on an Ancient Idea.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, edited by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 155-164.

Hawhee, Debra. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. University of Texas P, 2004.

Kinneavy, James L. “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning, edited by Jean Dietz Moss, The Catholic U of America P, 1986, pp. 79-105.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 16, no. 4-5, Dec. 1991/Jan. 1992, pp. 1-6, https://wlnjournal.org/ archives/v16/164&5.pdf. Accessed 19 Mar. 2016.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.”

College English, vol. 46, no. 5, Sept. 1984, pp. 433446. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/377047. Accessed 19 Mar. 2014.

Nodoushan, Mohammad Ali Salmani. “The Role of Metacognition in the Language Teaching Profession.” Journal on Educational Psychology, vol. 2, no. 1, May-July 2008, pp. 1-9, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1066304.pdf.

Accessed 25 Mar. 2016.

Nordolf, John. “Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and the Role of Theory in Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2014, pp. 45-64, http://writing centers.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/10/Nordlof_WCJ34.1_201 4.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb. 2017.

Petruzzi, Antony P. “Kairotic Rhetoric in Freire’s Liberatory Pedagogy.” JAC, vol. 21, no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 349-381. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866408. Accessed 15 Nov. 2013.

Plato. Phaedrus. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 138-168.

Rickert, Thomas. “In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience.” JAC, vol. 24, no. 4, 2004, pp. 901-927. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866663. Accessed 15 Nov. 2013.

Rosé, Caroline P., et al. “The Role of Why Questions in Effective Human Tutoring.” Artificial Intelligence in Education, vol. 13, 2003, pp. 55-62.

Scott, Marc. “The Right Time and Proper Measure: Assessing in Writing Centers and James Kinneavy’s ‘Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric.’” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2013, http://www.praxisuwc.com/scott-111/. Accessed 1 March 2014.

Stephenson, Hunter W. Forecasting Opportunity: Kairos, Production, and Writing. University Press of America, Inc., 2005.

Taylor, Tim, et al. “Kairotic Moments in the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 7, no.

1, Fall 2009, http://www.praxisuwc.com/taylor-etal-71. Accessed 27 June 2013.

Thompson, Isabelle, and Jo Mackiewicz. “Questioning in Writing Center Conferences.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2014, pp. 37-70.

JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43443371.

Accessed 25 Feb. 2016.

Tienken, Christopher H., et al. “Questioning the Questions.” Education Digest, May 2010, pp. 28-32, https://lisdlearningstandards.wikispaces.com/file/ view/questions.pdf. Accessed 20 Mar. 2016.

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CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER: RESEARCH, QUASI RESEARCH, RAD RESEARCH, SMALL SCALE EVALUATIONS AND THE SEARCH FOR THE RIGHT FIT Kathryn Raign University of North Texas kathryn.raign@unt.edu Abstract In this article, I provide an overview of what our field recognizes as the most useful taxonomies of research. Based on this overview, I argue, via specific examples of published research, that we sometimes conflate simplicity with the simplistic. I conclude by offering an example of a quasi-experiment based on data I have collected that investigates statistical correlations between five factors: a student’s satisfaction with space, tutor’s knowledge, tutor’s ability to share knowledge, student’s likeliness to return to the center, and student’s likeliness to recommend the center.

Center directors have the most control over internal factors: who is hired as a tutor, what criteria are used to hire, and how tutors are trained. However, my data shows that these internal factors have less influence on students’ perceptions of the center than external factors such as space. Finally, if space is the most important factor in determining students’ perceptions of center, and center directors have little or no influence over that factor, are directors being unfairly evaluated when their administration looks at their ability to retain current center users, and bring in more? I conclude by exhorting other directors of other centers to share their own data, so that we can all learn from each other’s experiences.

Let me begin with a confession. I became a member of the community of composition and writing center scholars in the ‘90s. I learned from one of our field’s most respected historical researchers, Win Horner. I engaged in both theoretical and narrative inquiry. I was comfortable subjecting my ideas to the dialectical analysis of my colleagues. I spoke deconstruction.

I would not have been comfortable crunching numbers, using Excel, running statistical analyses, or running kappa tests. I would not have understood what you meant if you told me that N=213. Decades later, I still have a grudge against tables that contain more numbers than words, and I only learned to use Excel because it was a required aspect of managing my writing center’s budget. I know (in theory) what a kappa test is but doubt I could run one. I am in awe of my colleagues who have highly developed skills in statistics, and I am frightened that I will be left behind if I can’t learn to speak “data.”

As the cry for “more research” continues to ring throughout the journals I know and love, I am shaken to my core because my field may not have a place for me much longer. What is a social constructionist to do?

How do I transition from humanistic scholarship to empirical research? For me, the transition required that I take two steps. First, I needed to explore the full-

range of research methods being used in the field of writing center studies, and secondly, I needed to take what I learned from that exploration and make a leap of faith into empirical research, which I accomplished by conducting a quasi-experiment in which I used statistical analysis to look for correlations between five factors: a student’s satisfaction with space, a tutor’s knowledge, a tutor’s ability to share knowledge, a student’s likeliness to return to the center, and a student’s likeliness to recommend the center. I discovered that strong correlations do exist between several of the factors studied, though, surprisingly, the strongest correlations exist between external factors— space and the likelihoods that a student will return to the center or recommend it to a friend.

Let me begin by doing what I’m comfortable doing: providing an historical overview of the research conundrum.

Rebecca Day Babcock and Terese Thonus describe the field of writing center study as a burgeoning one typified by scholarship that is “largely artistic or humanistic, rather than scientific, in a field where both perspectives can and must inform our practice” (3).

“Both assessment and research should be based on empirical data, be they qualitative or quantitative, including narratives, numbers and anything noticed” (Babcock and Thonus 4). This empirical data can then be used to determine when we have “achieved success” in the arena of academic tutoring. However, as we all know, there is nothing “simple” about evaluating writing center success and merely answering the call to research will not solve my original problem—how do I transition from humanistic scholarship to empirical research (Babcock and Thonus 145)?

Sarah Liggett, Kerri Jordan, and Steve Price offer some illumination, providing a taxonomy of research methods that will “help readers understand the variety of methodological opportunities available to them” (55). However, while I find the availability of a methodological research toolbox comforting, it does neither me nor the many other researchers in my position of transition any good if we are unable to use the tools within it. So, in order to help myself and others understand how (and perhaps if) to use these

Cinderella’s Slipper • 22 tools to make the transition to empirical research, in this article, I • Provide a brief overview of what our field recognizes as the most useful taxonomies of research • Argue via specific examples of published research that we sometimes conflate simplicity—what Garr Reynolds describes as “an intelligent desire for clarity,” with the simplistic—“dumbed down to the point of being deceptive or misleading” (103) • Offer an example of a quasi-experiment based on data I have collected, with meta-discourse to explain the methodology I chose, why, and whether I made an effective choice.

While I undertake this journey for selfish reasons—I do not want to be left behind as my field continues to grow and transform—I hope that if you feel illequipped for the future, you will benefit as well.

Overview of Research Methodologies Different scholars use different rationales to identify the various research methodologies currently being used, so I have synthesized the dominant arguments into the list below. I have taken my terminology of the different research methods from the work of the following scholars: • In 2005, Richard Haswell provided an indepth definition and description of RAD (replicable, aggregable, data-supported) research.

He then looks at NCTE/CCCC’s publication rate of RAD research over the past twenty years. He found a severe decline in the publication of RAD research, and questions whether this trend “will lead to the eventual disappearance of college composition as a legitimate field of study” (Haswell 215, 218).

• In 2011, Sarah Liggett, Kerri Jordan, and Steve Price offered what they called a “taxonomy of methodologies to understand how knowledge is—and can be—made in the complex context of writing centers;” they included practitioner inquiry, conceptual inquiry, and empirical inquiry (51, 68-73).

• In 2012, Dana Driscoll and Sherry Wynne Perdue reviewed the publication rate of RAD research in The Writing Center Journal from 1980-2009. 16.5% of the 270 articles they coded met their criteria for RAD research.

• In 2013, Ryan K. Boettger and Chris Lam looked at 137 articles published in the five primary technical communication journals over the past twenty years, and determined that experiments make up only 6.7% of the total articles (286). They suggest

reasons for this lack of experimental research: lack of training, and lack of departmental support due to a failure to understand the nature of experimental research (Boettger and Lam 288).

These authors have identified the following categories of research.

Experiments Liggett, Jordan, and Price explain that researchers test hypotheses by controlling variables in a specific context and using statistical analyses to measure results (71). I offer Driscoll and Perdue’s “Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009” as an example of an experiment. It qualifies as an experiment for the following reasons: Tests hypotheses. “How much research has been published in WCJ? How has this changed over time?

How much research published in WCJ is RAD (replicable, aggregable, data-supported) research? How has this changed over time? How do WCJ articles score in individual areas of the RAD Research Rubric? What are the most common methods of inquiry, types of research, and number of participants for empirical research studies published in WCJ?” (Driscoll and Perdue 17-18).

Manipulates at least one independent variable within a group of randomly assigned subjects in a controlled environment. Their group included all WCJ articles written from 1980-2009. They believed that reading every article created a richer dataset. They did not include articles from any other sources, concluding that WCJ is representative of the writing center research field (Driscoll and Perdue 18). The group is controlled because it is limited to WCJ publications.

Next, they developed an “article category rubric,” which they used to place each article in a type: “theoretical, practical, research, program description, historical, review, professional, reflection, position statement, and interview” (Driscoll and Perdue 19).

Each reader independently read and coded each article and assigned it a type—this is the manipulation by independent variable. In this case, each type is a variable, so there are 10 variables. Of the 270 articles they read, they identified 91 as research articles.

They then used a 7-point rubric to determine which articles could be identified as RAD research. In each category, the highest point value was 3 and the lowest was 0. Only articles that earned at least 10 points were considered RAD research (Driscoll and Perdue 20).

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Cinderella’s Slipper • 23 Uses statistical analyses to measure results. They entered the data into spreadsheets and PASW 18 (a piece of software used for analyzing data) for the analysis: “Descriptive statistics, including frequencies, means and medians were calculated” (Driscoll and Perdue 24).

In many cases, I think the complexity of some scholar’s experiments serves to confuse rather than clarify the points they are trying to make—more on this later.

Quasi-Experiments Quasi-experiments “consist of already established groups and occur in natural settings, such as a classroom or workplace;” “…Researchers must establish between-group equality” (Boettger and Lam 272-273).

A writing center director could conduct a quasiexperiment using undergraduate and graduate tutors as established groups in a natural setting—the writing center where they work. Quasi-experiments allow for an assumption that every member of the group is equal. So, a researcher could survey students who worked with both undergraduate and graduate tutors in order to determine if and why undergraduate or graduate tutors are more highly evaluated by students.

Quasi-experiments, which use both quantitative and qualitative research methods (statistical analysis and surveys), provide scholars with a method they need to explore complex questions (e.g. Do graduate tutors get higher student satisfaction scores because they are better tutors, or because students perceive that they are better tutors since they are in graduate school?). While true experiments test “a hypothesis by manipulating at least one independent within a group of randomly assigned subjects in a controlled environment,” quasiexperiments use already established groups that exist in an authentic setting, like a classroom or a workplace (Boettger and Lam 272). This makes the results more valid because what has been measured or observed is how participants would naturally react. It is the authenticity of collecting data in the natural setting of the writing center that makes quasi-experiments an effective choice for writing center research. Because quasi-experiments allow researchers to assume that groups are initially equal (all students who use the center comprise a group), they can apply their results to other groups in similar contexts. Therefore, because we can say A was true of group B in your center, it is likely to be true of group C in my center. In other words, undergraduate tutors are a group, and graduate tutors are another group, and all students who visit the center are a group. No other factors would be considered. This “broad stroke” approach allows us to

draw conclusions at the level of our discipline rather than our individual centers.

Small Scale Evaluations As Peter Carino and Doug Enders note, “A smallscale evaluation can be conducted via survey and arrayed in tabular form to present clear data” (84).

James H. Bell describes the small-scale evaluation as “…a series of carefully limited evaluations which, pieced together after a few years, create a fairly comprehensive picture” (16). Because of writing centers’ limited resources, small-scale evaluations focus on one primary factor at a time. Because small-scale evaluations focus on one aspect of a writing center at a time, they are manageable, and data can be built as new issues are explored, resulting in a broad scale understanding of a particular writing center over time.

Finally, those of us conducting small-scale evaluations should publish our designs and results in a form conducive to replication by other scholars to allow for the creation of comparable data collections (Bell 17).

Small-scale evaluations offer a solid starting point for scholars, such as myself, transitioning into data driven research, which is why, as I will explain later, I chose to conduct a small-scale evaluation to collect data for my quasi-experiment.

RAD Experiments The term Replicable, Aggregable, Data-supported (RAD) experiment serves as an umbrella term for each of the research methodologies we have discussed.

Experiments, quasi-experiments, and small-scale evaluations can be considered RAD research if the study is carefully designed and can be reproduced in other writing centers with the likelihood of getting the same results, which makes this method extremely useful to our field.

RAD research is intended to help scholars begin conversations rather than end them. It is not intended to suggest “a positivistic epistemology whereby ‘truth’ is out there to be discovered” (Carino and Enders 95).

It does attempt to support writing center lore by answering the questions, “How do we know this? Why does it work?” (Driscoll and Perdue 12). Carino and Enders’ project, which will be discussed next, is an example of RAD research. Carino and Enders chose to conduct an experiment, a choice that begs the question, are we trying to force our research into molds that don’t fit? Are we buckling under the weight of academic peer pressure? Are we forgetting that the selection of a research method “is just like any other rhetorical decision; it should fit the audience, purpose, and the project” (Driscoll and Purdue 13)?

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Cinderella’s Slipper • 24 We are all aware that our field is being scrutinized due to a lack of experimental research, and it is the pressure I have felt to give up ethnographic research in favor of experimental research that motivated this paper. Garr Reynolds acknowledges this pressure when he suggests professionals are so terrified of being described as “lightweight” that they adopt a “when in doubt add more” philosophy (103). Is this fear resulting in the writing of complex experiments for the sake of complexity, rather than for the sake of the methodology’s effectiveness?

Case in Point Carino and Enders conduct what they term a correlative study of student satisfaction as it is affected by the number of times a student uses the writing center—what would be categorized as an experiment (see page 4) because it manipulates at least one variable within a group of randomly assigned subjects in a controlled environment—in this case, the number of student visits constituted the independent variable and the responses to survey questions constituted the dependent variable. Carino and Enders wanted to determine if they could support the hypothesis that the more a student uses the writing center, the more he or she likes it. They argue that they chose to conduct quantitative research because they felt taking their data to a statistician would result in a “more sophisticated reading of it” (86). However, throughout the study, both writers admit to a lack of comfort with what they considered the “positivist” nature of statistics, preferring a more postmodern approach that put them at odds with positivist terms such as “findings” and “conclusions,” which they feel suggest a “truth” waiting to be discovered (Carino and Enders 86, 95, 96). They begin their study by announcing that “[they] do not believe numbers are necessarily a more reliable way to measure complex realities” (Carino and Enders 85). Secondly, recognizing that they had no background in statistics, they relied on others to crunch their numbers. Finally, they slip out from under their study all together, and manage to find the answer they were apparently seeking all along: Ultimately, we find ourselves answering our research question deconstructively, positing a ‘yes’ based on one way of reading the data and undoing it with a ‘no’ based on another, or placing the two answers side by side to say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ To those who would use statistics in the belief they are definite, this move would likely be condemned as the kind of semantic

legerdemain that literary types enjoy. (Carino and Enders 100-101) Why did they use this approach if they have both philosophical and epistemological doubts about the efficacy of using empirical research? The answer can be found in their conclusion: “[they] have a ‘data driven assessment’ at hand when the Dean comes knocking” (Carino and Enders 102).

Perhaps, a better rhetorical fit for their purpose (the dean might come knocking) would be a small-scale evaluation “that can be conducted via survey and arrayed in tabular form to present clear data to administrators interested in writing enter effectiveness” (Carino and Enders 84). Although Bell’s study does not make use of statistics, it is still RAD research, which does not require the use of statistics. Carino and Enders showed that they “(actually the statisticians)” could conduct statistical analysis (86). However, the question of whether they should have remains.

Although I first looked to this article as an example of a research model I could emulate, I instead found an example of why I should avoid the trap of choosing a research methodology based on peer pressure rather than its appropriateness to my purpose.

Choosing a Research Methodology As I hope I have already established, I began this paper as a means of making the transition from ethnographic to empirical research. Understanding the methods from which I can choose is a necessary start, but next, I must ask the appropriate questions grounded in rhetorical theory to choose my research path: • • • •

What do I want to know?

Why do I want to know it?

How will I go about investigating it?

How will I tell if I’ve found it? (Cuseo 1).

What Did I Want to Know?

After 9 years in the same location, my writing center moved. I was lucky enough to be asked what I wanted in my new space—a question I researched carefully. As a result, the center’s new space (bright, open, modern) was very different from the old space (small, dark, traditional), and I wanted to know if the new space would affect students’ satisfaction with the center. To answer this question, I had to rule out other factors that might also affect students’ satisfaction, such as the tutors’ knowledge and ability to share it.

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Cinderella’s Slipper • 25 Why Did I Want to Know It? Writing centers are typically squeezed in wherever the administration can find room and outfitted with furniture and equipment that no one else wants. I wanted to know if space affects students’ satisfaction with the center in order to be able to argue that a center’s success is at least partially based on the space it occupies.

How Will I Go About Investigating It? I decided that the most effective method to gather information was a paper survey that could be given to students at the end of their tutorials. I chose to use a paper survey that can be handed to students rather than an online survey because a study conducted by Duncan D. Nulty showed that “response rates to online surveys of teaching and courses are nearly always very much lower than those obtained when using on-paper surveys” (5).

How Will I Tell If I’ve Found It? I will know I have found an answer to my question if I can show that students who gave the center’s space a low rating and gave their tutors high ratings said they would not return to the center or recommend it to their friends.

After answering these questions, I came to several conclusions. I needed to collect my data within the natural setting of the writing center because it was the effectiveness of the space itself that interested me.

Secondly, I had a natural group of students I could survey—any student who came to the center. Because each student worked in the same space, regardless of his or her needs, I could consider their answers on the survey equal.

After referring back to my earlier list of methodologies, I realized that my study meets the qualifications for RAD research, and I could use a small-scale evaluation to collect data for a quasiexperiment. In this study, I use the data I collected, both quantitative and qualitative, to answer the following questions: • Does whether a tutor is considered knowledgeable affect whether a student will return to the center?

• Does whether the tutor shares his or her knowledge effectively affect whether a student will return to the center?

• Does whether a tutor is knowledgeable affect whether a student will recommend the center?

• Does whether a tutor shares his or her knowledge effectively affect whether a student recommends the center?

Does a student’s satisfaction with the space affect whether a student will return?

• Does the student’s satisfaction with the space affect whether he or she will recommend the center?

• Is it true that the lower the student’s satisfaction with the space the less likely he or she is to return?

Next, I discuss the methodology that I developed.

•

Methodology I used the following procedure to survey students.

The writing center at the University of North Texas (UNT) is used by many types of students, all of whom were surveyed: • developmental writers • students taking Composition 1 or 2 • students taking all levels of technical writing • any enrolled undergraduate • any enrolled graduate student At the end of each tutorial, the worker at the front desk hands a student a copy of the five-question survey and asks him or her to fill it out and place it in the box on the desk. Once a week, the box is emptied and tutors sort the surveys. Below is a copy of the survey: Not Some Very at all what much How comfortable is the 1 2 3 writing center’s working space?

Was your tutor knowledgeable?

Did your tutor share that knowledge effectively?

Would you recommend the writing center to your friends?

1

2

3

1

2

3

1

2

3

Who was your tutor? __________________________ Comments? _________________________________ __________________________________________ Figure 1: Student Satisfaction Survey Although this survey is relatively simple, respondents are “less likely to answer if a question is too long or they do not understand how they should answer” (Oracle 2). A study conducted by Pete Cape and Keith Phillips showed that “if researchers work to keep surveys shorter, it will not only help to ensure response quality, but it will also make for more motivated and responsive respondents” (10). The type of answer is equally important. “A good question asks for just one piece of information and doesn’t have any additional questions embedded within it” (Oracle 2).

The use of matrix-style questions—grouping questions that employ the same answer choices (which can make

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Cinderella’s Slipper • 26 it easier to respond) also increases the number of responses (Oracle 2). Finally, answers must be clearly labeled to allow respondents to give accurate answers.

If a survey asks respondents to rank their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 3, but does not clearly assign meaning to those numbers (e.g. Which is highly satisfied, 1 or 3?), the answers “will be worthless” (Oracle 4).

Over the course of this semester, the center tutored approximately 1,964 students—N=1,964, the total number of students who used the center. I say approximately because this number does not include students who attended workshops, or every student who came during our walk-in hours (5-9 Monday through Thursday) when we do not have a student worker at the front desk ensuring that every student is checked-in. 310 of the 1,964 (16%) students sampled responded to the survey.

Quantitative (Objective) Data Next, I include the data that I pulled from the surveys. After placing my data in spreadsheets, I could begin looking for the correlations that would answer my questions. On the advice of a friend who is an expert in statistics, I used the following correlation calculator: Pearson Correlation Coefficient Calculator (http://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/pearson). After I received my results, I placed them in a piece of statistics software called SPSS to double-check my data—again on the advice of my friend. The table that follows was produced by SPSS. (1) Likeliness to Return

(1) Likeliness to Return (2) Likeliness to Recommend (3) Satisfaction with Space (4) Tutor’s Knowledge (5) Ability to Share Knowledge

(2) Likeliness to Recomme nd

(3) Satisfaction with Space

(4) Tutor’s Knowl edge

(5) Tutor’s Ability to Share That Knowledge

1.00 0.409**

1.00

0.182**

0.233**

1.00

0.089

0.140*

.146*

1.00

0.073

0.266**

0.124*

0.439**

1.00

Discussion of Data As the table demonstrates, 5 correlations were significant with a 1% margin of error and 3 were significant with a 5% margin of error. 4 of the total correlations did not include satisfaction with space: • Likeliness to recommend/Likeliness to return • Ability to share knowledge/Likeliness to recommend • Ability to share knowledge/Tutor’s knowledge • Ability to share knowledge/Likeliness to recommend Table 1: Non-space Related Correlations

Non,space!Related!Correla8ons!

0.5!

0.45!

0.4!

0.35!

0.3!

0.25!

0.2!

0.15!

0.1!

0.05!

0!

Recommend/Return!

Share/Recommend!

Share/Tutor's!Knowledge! Share/Recommend2!

4 were based on satisfaction with space: • Satisfaction with space/Likeliness to return • Satisfaction with space/Likeliness to recommend • Tutor’s knowledge/Satisfaction with space • Ability to share knowledge/Satisfaction with space Though space-related correlations are smaller than the others, they are still significant.

* Significant at 0.05 (2-tailed)—5% margin of error **Significant at 0.01 (2-tailed)—1% margin of error Figure 2: Correlations Calculated

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Cinderella’s Slipper • 27 Table 2: Non-space Versus Space

Non-space/Space 0.5!

0.4!

0.3!

0.2!

0.1!

0!

Non,space!

Space!

The non-space related correlations are of little surprise. We would expect students who would recommend the lab to return to the lab, just as we would expect students to assume that tutors who can share knowledge must have knowledge, and a writing center where tutors can share knowledge is a center worth recommending. These correlations are reassuring because they demonstrate that so much of the work of the center director—hiring, training, and supervising tutors—is not wasted. Just as importantly, this data provides writing center directors with tangible evidence that they can give the administration to prove that their work is increasing the number of students likely to use the center, either because they will return or recommend the center to a friend.

On the other hand, the correlations based on satisfaction with space are disturbing. Why disturbing?

In most cases, center directors have the most control over internal factors: who is hired as a tutor, what criteria are used to hire, and how tutors are trained.

However, in my experience, center directors are not often able to choose either their physical location or the equipment within that location. Too often, centers are shoved into any unused corner or classroom available. The space isn’t chosen for its effectiveness. It is chosen simply because it is available. When center directors are given choices they are often superficial: what color would you like us to paint the walls? Where should we place the furniture? Rarely do center directors have the opportunity to make those space decisions that might truly increase a student’s satisfaction—sound barriers, comfortable furniture, natural lighting, access to food, drink, and bathrooms.

According to Nancy Van Note Chism, corporations, hospitals, and institutes of learning are reconsidering

the importance of everything from furniture and lighting to the availability of restrooms and food (10).

If space is an important factor in determining whether students return to a center, recommend that center, or believe that the tutors in that center have the ability to effectively share a body of knowledge, and center directors have little or no influence over that factor, are directors being unfairly evaluated when their administrations look at their ability to retain current center users and bring in more?

By being denied the option to choose and design a center’s space based on both empirical research and best practices, are center directors being set up for failure? No one would expect a researcher in the STEM areas to conduct research in a space that wasn’t properly designed and equipped for maximum results, yet center directors, center tutors, and the students who use those centers are expected to work in substandard locations every day.

This data supports the importance of the physical space in which writing centers are typically housed, and reiterates the need for writing centers to be designed intentionally, not squeezed in wherever the administration can find room, and outfitted with furniture and equipment that no one else wants. Although the written comments I received will be the focus of another paper, I do want to touch on what I found because space is a crucial factor.

Qualitative (Subjective) Data—Student Comments The numbers tell a good story, but they don’t tell the only story. The students’ comments add another layer of support.

37% of students who filled out the survey included a comment. Of the 106 total comments (N=106), 12 were negative—11%. On the surface, this seems to be cause for concern; however, of the 12 negative comments, • 30% (4 students) requested more space • 30% (4 students) requested more time • 10% (1 student) observed that the center was unprepared for the class size of a workshop (more than 40 students attended) • 10% (1 student) suggested that tutorials would be enriched if more than one tutor participated • 20% (2 students) suggested that one tutor gets off-topic 40% of all comments were directly related to the issue of space.

Writing centers have traditionally existed in what Russell Carpenter describes as the “peripheral spaces within our institutions,” a problem as students “receive strong messages of what [their] learning experience is

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Cinderella’s Slipper • 28 likely to be” based on the space in which it occurs (xxv, 5). If the messages predict something “interesting” or “exciting,” they are more likely to choose to engage (Carpenter 5).

I hope that this small-scale study will have two effects: I hope you are empowered to conduct your own research. Each of you is in possession of a treasure trove of important information, both statistical and anecdotal. Sharing this data with your administration is the first step in validating the work your center does and the resources you need to amplify its success.

I hope you are empowered to make some noise— “…noise should be expected and recognized for what it is: an attempt to alert others” (Boquet 6). Let your organization’s decision-makers know that you will not be satisfied with the broom closet. You, your tutors, and your students deserve more and you have the data to prove it.

Conclusion I have learned an important lesson. Numbers do tell a story, and with the correct tools, statistical analysis is possible and provides a powerful resource.

Without using statistical analysis to identify correlations in my raw data, I could not have answered my research questions, and I would not have a body of meaningful data that I can use to begin an important conversation with my university’s administration—one in which I hope to use my data to demonstrate that the writing center would benefit from an improved location.

Without the data I have collected, I could not have this conversation effectively.

I still believe that the very nature of the writing center requires us to respect and honor the work that writing centers epitomize—talking, thinking, writing, laughing, sharing. Those of us who are called to work in writing centers share a secret—writing centers are places of mystery, magic, and multiplicity. To succeed, and to help our students succeed, we must not only rely upon our reliable and known tools, but we must also seek out new ones.

Works Cited Babcock, Rebecca Day & Terese Thonus. Researching The Writing Center. Peter Lang, 2012, New York.

Bell, J. H. “When Hard Questions Are Asked: Evaluating Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2000, pp. 7-28.

Boettger, Ryan & Chris Lam. “An Overview of Experimental and Quasi-experimental Research in Technical Communication Journals (1992-2011).”

IEEE Transactions of Professional Communication, vol.

56, no. 4, 2013, pp. 272-293.

Boquet, Elizabeth H. Noise From the Writing Center. Utah State University Press, 2002, Logan, Utah.

Cape, Peter & Keith Phillips. "Questionnaire Length, Fatigue Effects and Response Quality Revisited." Apr, 2015, <https://www.surveysampling.com/site/assets/files/1 586/questionnaire-length-and-fatiigue-effects-the-latestthinking-and-practical-solutions.pdf.>

Carino, Peter and Doug Enders. "Does Frequency of Visits to the Writing Center Increase Student Satisfaction? A Statistical Correlation Study—or Story." The Writing Center Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 2001, pp. 82-193.

Carpenter, Russell G. "Preface." Cases on Higher Education Spaces: Innovation, Collaboration, and Technology. Ed. Russell G. Carpenter. Information Science Reference, 2013. Pennsylvania, pp. xxiiixxxv.

Chism, Nancy Van Note. “A Tale of Two Classrooms.”

New Directions in Teaching and Learning, Dec. 1, 2002, pp. 5-12.

Cuseo, Joseph. "Assessment of the First-year Experience: Six Significant Questions." Esource for College Transitions.

6 Nov. 2000. Apr. 5 2015.

< http://sc.edu/fye/esource/>.

Driscoll, Dana & Sherry Wynn Perdue. "Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009." The Writing Center Journal, vol.

32, no.1, 2012, pp. 11-39.

Haswell, Richard H. "NCTE/CCCC's Recent War on Scholarship." Written Communication, vol. 22, no. 2, 2008, pp. 198-223.

Johanek, Cindy. Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm, for Rhetoric and Composition. Utah State Press, 2000, Logan, Utah.

Johnson, Burke R. and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie. "Mixed Methods Research: A Research Paradigm Whose Time Has Come." Educational Researcher, vol. 33, no. 7, 2007, pp.14-26.

Liggett, Sarah, Kerri Jordan, & Steve Price. "Mapping Knowledge-making in Writing Center Research: A Taxonomy of Methodologies." The Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 50-88.

Nulty, Duncan D. "The Adequacy of Response Rates to Online And Paper Surveys." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2008. www.uaf.edu/files/uafgov/fsadmin-nulty5-1910.pdf>.

Oracle. "Best Practices for Improving Survey Participation."

15, Apr, 2015, /www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/best-practicesimprove-survey-1583708.pdf, 2012>.

Reynolds, Garr. Presentation Zen. New Rider Press, 2012, Logan, Utah.

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TOWARD A RHETORIC OF LABOR ACTIVISM IN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY WRITING CENTERS1 Liliana M. Naydan Penn State Abington lmn122@psu.edu Abstract This essay considers the present degree of the writing center field’s engagement with labor activism in the age of the corporate university and argues that writing center practitioners are well positioned to reconstitute their identities: to re-envision themselves and their colleagues as poised to engage in activist rhetorics and live lives as academic activists. By employing a rhetoric of labor activism and thereby addressing labor issues in more robust ways alongside professional organizations that represent them, writing centers can work to revitalize shared governance and academic freedom, both of which are threatened by corporatizing forces, and they can influence emergent institutional and professional histories.

Labor movement activists and academics often sustain rhetorical strategies that exist in apparent juxtaposition with one another, and this juxtaposition manifests as problematic in an era that has witnessed the rise of the corporate university as scholars such as Marc Bousquet and Henry Giroux have theorized it—a university that, according to Bousquet, has “embraced the values and practices of corporate management” to produce “the return of the sort of dizzying inequalities formerly associated with the Gilded Age,” especially in the field of rhetoric and composition (How the University Works 1). The labor movement makes arguments to an audience of current and prospective activists, and those arguments place value on solidarity and equality, not on hierarchical and oppressive power structures. Labor activists readily engage in actions with picket signs.

They readily chant about better pay and better working conditions. As actions like the 2011 revolution in Egypt suggest, activists increasingly make use of digital media, most notably Twitter and Facebook, to convey their messages to a global audience. They want their arguments to get attention. The boldness of their argumentation distinguishes their arguments as attention-getting to supporters and perhaps abrasive to opponents. Yet, in certain ways, the kind of bold argumentation on which activists rely stands in stark contrast to the decorous rhetoric that academics at increasingly corporate universities may manifest via tempered and researched arguments. Academics write articles and conference papers that eschew personal opinion for rigorous and supposedly objective analysis; they write papers not unlike this essay that, in form and function, generally uphold traditional notions of what

counts as academic. Although conservatives readily attack academia as a bastion of liberalism and although plenty of academics certainly identify as activists of the sort that Patricia M. Malesh and Sharon McKenzie Stevens describe in Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements or of the sort that Linda Adler-Kassner gestures toward in The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers, there nonetheless exists a palpable tension between the controlled decorum that characterizes certain academics at American colleges and universities and the potentially (and perhaps ideally) radical rhetoric of labor activism. And there exists a palpable tension especially for contingent academic workers who would benefit from engagement with both labor activist and academic discourse communities.

This essay considers the problem of contingent writing center workers who “serve in insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom” (“Contingent Faculty Positions”). I position rhetoric as a means by which contingent writing center workers can begin the process of solving the problems associated with contingency in the age of the corporate university. I examine the present degree of the writing center field’s rhetorical engagement with labor activism, and, in turn, I argue that writing center practitioners might engage in an activist rhetoric that is evocative of Harry C. Denny’s conception of writing centers as potential “advocates (or activists) for change in academic culture” (Facing 26). Building on Rita Malenczyk’s A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators and especially Seth Kahn’s “What is a Union?” chapter in Malenczyk’s collection, I suggest that writing center practitioners are well positioned by way of the attention that they inherently pay to language to reconstitute their identities: to re-envision themselves and their colleagues as poised to engage in activist rhetoric and live lives as academic activists. In particular, these practitioners are able to engage in a process of reconstitution if the international, national, and regional professional organizations that connect them—namely the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) and the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW)—more explicitly

Toward a Rhetoric of Labor Activism • 30 acknowledge the realities of practitioners’ working conditions and more fully adopt the language and values of the labor movement. By employing a rhetoric of labor activism and thereby addressing labor issues in more robust ways, writing centers and the organizations that represent them can work to revitalize shared governance and academic freedom, which are currently threatened by corporatizing forces.

They can influence emergent institutional and professional histories. Hence they can counter dominant narratives of education and professionalism and recast both education and professionalism as always already activist enterprises.

Writing Center Rhetorics and the Corporate University Writing centers and the professionals who work in them sustain a dynamic connection to labor history. As evidenced by Kenneth Bruffee’s work at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1970s, writing centers find their modern origins in the profoundly liberal history of open admissions and the labor changes—and in some cases labor exploitation—that ensued because of them. Amid the influx of students and arguably limited funding for skilled labor that open admissions created, peer tutoring as contemporary writing centers conceive of it was born. As CUNY faculty held “classes in rented store fronts and trailers” and “[took] turns at shared desks” while students “shunn[ed] jammed libraries to study in telephone booths,” students at CUNY and elsewhere at colleges with open admissions began, to quote Elizabeth H. Boquet, “to inhabit” the writing center (“Open Admissions” 81; 53). They began “to hang hand-lettered renditions of favorite quotations on the wall, to jot down jokes on the board, to leave their own work on the tables while answering a question” (Boquet 53).

They shaped the field’s pedagogical perspective on collaborative learning in profound ways; perhaps they also came to exist as staples of writing centers because of real or strategically manufactured funding shortages: because there weren’t enough faculty members to provide sufficient mentoring to the many students who were attending college at this key historical moment in academic labor history.

In turn, the rhetorics that writing center professionals employ in certain ways evoke the

connection to the world of labor, and there came to exist then, as there exists now, a commonality between the rhetoric of organizing—a complement to activist rhetoric that should not be conflated with activist rhetoric—and the rhetoric of tutoring. Veteran organizer Lee Staples’s portrayal of organizing rhetoric in Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing effectively illustrates the commonality between organizing rhetoric and writing center rhetoric.2 As Staples suggests, “[t]he best organizers,” meaning individuals who identify and bring together activists for collective action that builds power, “will have the ability to listen as well as the capacity to motivate, often being able to help someone finish what they’ve just begun to say” (9). Hence they function much like the best writing center consultants, who must listen well to writers’ ideas and concerns. Furthermore, like “[m]uch of the work” in which an organizer engages “can be done by the skillful use of Socratic questioning” that enables members to “make their own decisions and hopefully become more involved than when someone simply gives them an answer,” writing center consultants often ask key open-ended questions to get writers thinking and writing (Staples 11). And, of course, Staples observes that it is “the organizer’s job to get other people”—namely activists—involved and eager “to take the lead” in notably different ways than organizers might take the lead (8). They function much like the best writing center consultants, who aim to create space for writers’ voices and ideas instead of overwhelming writers with their own ideas and voices. In other words, both organizers and writing consultants aim to create conditions in which others take the lead.

Although writing center rhetoric very much dovetails with a rhetoric of organizing, writing centers, writing center scholars, and the professional organizations that represent them sustain thorny relationships with activist rhetoric.

Activist rhetoric is a notably different rhetoric from organizing rhetoric, and it also conflicts with academic rhetoric. This thorny relationship between activist and academic rhetoric exists even though Jackie Grutsch McKinney argues that writing center professionals shape a master narrative of writing centers as “comfortable, yet

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iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (3). Certainly, writing centers, writing center scholars, and professional organizations consistently acknowledge the marginalized history or even present-day marginalized reality of writing centers: the source of the iconoclasm to which McKinney’s scholarship speaks. Yet as a result, they also showcase a consistent concern with shaping writing center studies as a legitimate academic field within a corporate university setting that so values hierarchy. Denny perhaps best characterizes the sub-discipline’s struggle for legitimacy in “Queering the Writing Center,” observing that “[l]ike queer people, writing center professionals continually confront our marginality: we daily encounter students and faculty alike who approach our spaces with uneasiness” (264). And as Denny suggests in Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring, “[j]ust as composition studies claims a good deal of victimhood by being positioned (or positioning itself) as a step-child in larger English Studies and literary scholarship, writing center academics can follow a similar path, viewing the field as further subsidiary, narrowly restricted to the pragmatics of day-to-day (or session-to-session) execution of practice” (5). As Denny continues, “writing center studies, like wider English studies, risks going the way of the Classics if we don’t play an active role in making our field and the humanities relevant and vital to a post-industrial academy” (Facing 5).

In the face of a palpable anxiety about legitimacy and regardless of whether scholars see a reading of the writing center as marginal as a “tired” one, rhetorical approaches that scholars and professional organizations may employ can pander in ways to the values of the corporate university (Denny, Facing 5). The subtle but significant ways in which some contemporary writing center rhetoric reifies the rhetoric of the corporate university emerges in an array of modes and media that I consider here. For instance, this pandering rhetoric appears in ideas about what counts as scholarship—ideas that continue to evolve in writing center studies as calls for more replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research emerge and as critiques of non-RAD research emerge. Consider, for example, Dana

Driscoll and Sherry Wynn Perdue’s “Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980–2009,” which acknowledges that “many writing centers continue to be staffed by graduate students and faculty ‘transplants’ from English literature programs” who have been “trained in the humanities” and not “the social sciences” (15). In their essay, Driscoll and Perdue call for writing center researchers to produce more RAD research and to “speak a common research language, one that allows others from both within and outside of our field to retrace our steps and test our claims” (35).

Certainly, this suggestion speaks to a legitimate and exciting desire to improve writing center practice that emerges out of writing center scholarship. It aims, no doubt, to make the field better, as does a more tempered call for RAD research made in Rebecca Day Babcock and Terese Thonus’s Researching the Writing Center: Towards an Evidence-Based Practice.3 Yet these kinds of calls, too, function to alienate a cross-section of the writing center profession’s workforce much like university administrations alienate adjunct faculty by identifying them as being in ways lesser than tenure-line faculty—as being non-researchers or lesser teachers as a result of the purported lack of research that they produce (even though plenty of adjuncts certainly produce research and get rave reviews as teachers).4 Despite the good intentions of those who make them, these calls for RAD research inevitably devalue the professional backgrounds of writing center workers and the work that writing center workers do much like the corporate university ideologically and materially devalues the work done by writing teachers teaching first-year writing by paying poor wages and by withholding benefits and job security. As Bousquet observes, “[w]riting faculty generally work with diminished or nonexistent academic freedom protections, few resources, and often little acquaintance with the disciplinary knowledge of rhet-comp;” and as I extrapolate, some writing center faculty and staff also experience disenfranchisement from broader corporate university forces and perhaps, too, from colleagues who most value social-science approaches to research as opposed to humanitiesbased approaches (How the University Works

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158). They experience disenfranchisement from colleagues who attempt to create insides and outsides of what counts as disciplinary knowledge and hence as the discipline.

Rhetoric that panders to corporate university interests likewise emerges in the materials that writing center professional organizations sometimes propagate. For instance, the IWCA’s website for the most part ignores the labor crisis that has pervaded higher education since at least 2008, save a position statement from 1985 written

by Jeanne H. Simpson titled “What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns.” This statement addresses “the conditions under which we [as writing center professionals] work”: conditions that are often “dreadful [...] not because administrators are intentionally making things difficult but because no one has a clear idea of how things should be” (Simpson). And, sadly, working conditions have not changed dramatically over the last thirty years even though talk of conditions appears to have dissipated, at least as the IWCA’s website portrays it via its rhetoric of silence on the subject. The website also lacks even the kind of minimal support for candidates doing job searches provided by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization that has faced harsh criticism for its own lack of action regarding the labor crisis.5 Whereas the MLA provides yearly reports on job availability, surveys involving the placement of Ph.D.s in language disciplines, and advice for jobseekers (however outdated that advice may be), the IWCA provides only a publically accessible jobs list and pays little attention to the problem of contingency. It therefore overlooks a key fact that Emily Isaacs and Melinda Knight report: that “writing centers are directed by people in non-tenure-track faculty positions predominantly (71%)” (48). Moreover, and notably not unlike the MLA’s website, the IWCA’s website sustains the primary rhetorical aim of attracting engagement in the profession. It does so even though the profession may be illequipped to provide jobs with fair labor conditions to all of those interested in it. It suggests a reality far removed from Denny’s vision of the writing center’s activist potential. To use McKinney’s terminology, it suggests that we

perhaps aren’t as iconoclastic as some of us might like to believe.

Similarly, online materials produced by the NCPTW employ rhetorical strategies that subvert activist impulses and thereby subtly or overtly support the corporate university’s initiatives. As Isaacs and Knight report, reinforcing Bousquet’s sense of the field of rhetoric and composition as particularly prone to hiring contingent workers,6 a high percentage of writing centers “[include] students in the mix of consultants” (49). Scholars of labor in rhetoric and composition have tended to characterize these student workers as an absent presence among contingent workers. Writing center professionals might see the profession as avoiding the reality that writing tutors are contingent workers in frequently articulated celebrations of the field and student workers’ place in it. For instance, if you look at the websites via which we represent ourselves, we tout ourselves as “promot[ing] the teaching of writing through collaborative learning;” we tout “NCPTW professionals” as “leaders in collaborative approaches” who “[respond] to the challenges of creating and operating writing centers, developing innovative peer tutoring programs, and promoting the work of their peer tutors;” and we tout peer tutors as having “the opportunity to contribute in professional and scholarly ways to the larger writing center community” (“Welcome”). In other words, writing center administrators tell themselves that they help to provide undergraduate peer tutors with opportunities that are good for them because these peer tutors are learning. The notion that we provide these educational opportunities—opportunities that I certainly do see as beneficial—helps us to rest easy as we participate covertly in a very real sort of labor exploitation. This exploitation contributes to leaving those with Ph.D.s in hand out of work. It also contributes to leaving undergraduate peer tutors to either pay to work by virtue of paying tuition for tutor education courses or as grossly underpaid given the institutional necessity for and significance of their labor.

My critique of the absence of any indication of contingent status among undergraduate or graduate student tutors is not intended to suggest that any and every online space serves as the

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appropriate or ideal venue for explications of academic labor conditions. Indeed, not all online spaces serve as ideal outlets for activism But my critique does intend to draw attention to the fact that writing center professionals of all kinds have yet to find any significant rhetorical space to draw attention to contingency and labor movement questions. We have only a handful of scholarly articles that touch on the subject of contingency and writing centers, and most scholarly articles, like our websites, ignore the subject of contingency altogether. Even the seminal study “What They Take with Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project”—a study that I want to stress that I very much admire—opts to laud writing centers for all the benefits that they provide to undergraduate tutors who inhabit them but makes not even the slightest gesture toward labor exploitation. Peer tutoring as part of a conversation about labor exploitation remains a taboo topic because it potentially undermines the work of writing centers. To echo McKinney, it undermines part of the master narrative that writing center practitioners like to create about themselves and propagate: the part that characterizes writing centers as “comfortable” places —places in which something like labor exploitation would never occur (3).

Possibilities through Rhetorical Reconstitution Writing center practitioners must hold together the possibilities that 1) writing centers do important and exciting work, that 2) writing center professionals of all kinds benefit from their engagement with writing centers, and that 3) writing centers exist as spaces in which real labor exploitation can and does occur. But doing so requires a flexible mind and a critical one as well.

Yet holding these ideas together produces a foundation for what rhetoricians have referred to as reconstitution, which Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback define as the “process by which audiences redefine themselves” (128). In other words, reconstitution involves developing a new way of talking and thereby a new way of thinking about the self, and it often emerges as a result of conversational exchanges. Hence one rhetor can stimulate another rhetor to reconstitute her or his identity through conversation. Or a

rhetor can reconstitute her or his own identity through engagement with the written word in digital spaces and in print. Jensen and Hammerback consider reconstitution in relation to activist Robert Parris Moses, arguing that “Moses’s life prepared him to become a reconstitutive rhetor for civil rights” (128). In research more closely related to this consideration of labor, Mary E. Triece’s “‘Intelligent Worker’: Rhetorical Reconstitution and the Influence of Firsthand Experience in the Rhetoric of Leonora O’Reilly” considers reconstitution in relation to labor identity. It argues that O’Reilly “rhetorically reconstituted her audience into a group of outspoken workers willing to agitate for workplace improvements” (6). Whereas Triece sees O’Reilly as fashioning her audience as an intelligent workforce of “strong-willed woman worker[s],” I suggest that writing center workers who are concerned about labor conditions must combat detrimental elitist attitudes that accompany the intelligent worker status that in many cases inherently accompanies academic jobs, be these jobs in or beyond writing centers (6). In other words, writing center workers concerned with labor justice might explore ways in which to organize colleagues who have yet to develop labor activist identities via reconstitution as O’Reilly used it, but toward a notably different end than she had in mind. They might reconstitute their fellow workers toward an end that finds commonality between labor activism and academic identity.

If writing center administrators or consultants seek to invite their colleagues to reconstitute their identities, they might do so by adopting the language of organizers and labor activists; they might do so by showcasing ways by which labor activist rhetoric dovetails with academic rhetoric.

For instance, labor activists value collaboration and attention to language much like academics (especially those working in writing centers) do.

They seek a collaborative means by which to determine the terms of their employment via collective bargaining, and they value the process of puzzling over language, which Kahn suggests by pointing out that “[c]ollective bargaining agreements have lots of moving parts—that is, seemingly unconnected sections/clauses of

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contract language” that “will impact each other in ways that can be very oblique, sometimes even inconsistent” (213). Moreover, labor activist rhetoric’s commonality with academic rhetoric emerges in academic perspectives on labor such as those that Bousquet and Noam Chomsky put forth. Labor organizations that draw attention to the labor movement’s proponents in academia reify the commonality between labor movement and academic rhetorics. For instance, events such as the 2010 Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) Conference at Stony Brook University that hosted Bousquet as the keynote speaker or the 12 July 2013 University of Michigan Graduate-Employees’-Organization and Lecturers’Employee-Organization-sponsored talk by Noam Chomsky on the subject of “The Corporatization of the University” present the interplay between questions of labor and academic ways of thinking, speaking, and acting as academics concerned with labor manifest them via their academic work. Such events are persuasive to an audience of academics that perhaps feels skeptical about labor as a counter-academic force. They persuade all audiences that labor questions are part and parcel of academia and academic life, and hence they help to reconstitute a skeptical audience, providing that audience with rhetorical models for engaging in labor struggles as academics.

Other strategies exist for labor activists among writing center professionals who seek to begin the process of inviting non-activist professionals in the field to reconstitute their identities. These strategies involve employing labor activist rhetorics as part of the digital and physical faces of our centers. To make more of digital developments that characterize contemporary activism and contemporary writing centers, writing center websites might employ language relevant to the labor movement in opportune ways. For instance, they might draw attention to the contingent status that characterizes the majority of the field’s workers as a nexus around which supporters of centers can take action. Instead of inviting writers who visit the writing center to evaluate consultants or services without a sense of the stakes, online evaluations might draw attention to the fact that jobs and funding for services depend on writers’ evaluations and that

evaluations can function as activist efforts of a subtle sort. Websites might also draw attention to the array of jobs that consultants hold—their full identities as workers in and beyond the writing center. And they might, too, draw attention to aspirations that writing center professionals have beyond the contingent jobs that, in many cases, help them to make ends meet. Finally, in order to reconstitute their own identities, writing centers might more readily celebrate overt activist rhetorics—the picket signs and the chants and the range of written and spoken language that have worked via the digital and non-digital world to create tangible social change. They might in overt and visible ways, by way of décor and events, show that to be an effective writer and rhetor very much means to be an agent of change on a local, state, national, or even global scale.

By way of reconstituted identities, writing center professionals will emerge as better equipped to revitalize both shared governance and academic freedom at the institutions that house them, key, interrelated components of academia’s identity that have come under fire in subtle and overt ways in the age of the corporate university.

Shared governance is the notion that faculty (and students such as peer writing consultants, I would add) should be involved in “personnel decisions, selection of administrators, preparation of the budget, and determination of educational policies,” and it in large part emerges as a possibility because academic freedom exists at least in theory if not in practice (“Shared Governance”). It emerges because faculty who have the luxury of tenure’s protection at least in theory feel free to speak about the ways in which their respective institutions should run. Perhaps because shared governance depends so much on academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) identifies “[p]rotecting academic freedom” as its “core mission” (“Protecting Academic Freedom”). As the “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” suggests, the organization believes that “[t]he common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition” (Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure). Yet Bousquet observes that “[w]riting faculty generally work with diminished or

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nonexistent academic freedom protections” because of many writing programs’ and English departments’ reliance on non-tenure-line faculty to teach first-year writing (How the University Works 158). In turn, writing center professionals who perhaps altogether lack faculty status also sustain diminished or non-existent academic freedom.

They sustain this diminished or non-existent academic freedom unless or until they reconstitute their identities to position themselves to work in activist ways for greater job security. They sustain this diminished or non-existent academic freedom unless or until they value themselves and their work enough to organize and conduct actions for post-secondary institutions to value them in tangible ways.

As writing center professionals reconstitute their identities to change dynamics involving academic freedom and shared governance at their respective institutions, they inevitably rework the narrative of their institutional histories as well as the narrative of writing center professionals broadly construed—the kind of narrative that McKinney theorizes. They shape education and professionalism in their most influential and inspiring forms as always already activist enterprises that seek to change the status quo.

They provide a real-world incentive for dismantling at least part of the present master narrative as McKinney identifies it: the part that involves propagating an image of writing centers as wholly comfortable spaces. There exists nothing comfortable about labor exploitation or those who opt to ignore its subtle existence or avoid the inevitably uncomfortable work of countering it. There does, however, exist a possibility of a new kind of writing center and writing center history. In it, the writing center professional who exists presently as adjunct can earn fair pay and attain job security and thus emerge in material terms as wholly essential to the mission and future of the academy.

Notes 1. This article is a revised version of a presentation delivered with Dawn Fels, Clint Gardner, and Maggie Herb at the 2015 International Writing Centers Association Conference. I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank my wonderful co-

presenters for the great conversations we had and continue to have about labor in writing centers and for their comments on the shorter conference presentation version of my piece. Their feedback on my argument helped to make this article a reality.

2. See Liliana M. Naydan’s “Leadership as Organizing in the Writing Center” for a discussion of the rhetorics of organizing and of tutoring writing.

3. As Babcock and Thonus put it, “writing center scholarship has been largely artistic or humanistic, rather than scientific, in a field where both perspectives can and must inform our practice. While theoretical investigations build the foundation for writing center studies, and anecdotal experience points in the direction of best practices, empirical research will create a credible link between the two” (3).

4. For example, consider the comments made by administrators in Amrutha Sivakumar’s 19 March 2013 Michigan Daily article, “The Research Difference: How the University varies the value of faculty members.”

5. Consider, for instance, the formation of MLA Democracy as a critique of the MLA. As MLA Democracy’s website explains, “MLA Democracy is a spontaneous movement that aims to place activists into MLA governance and to ensure the organization is responsive to the concerns of all members” (“Occupy the Profession”).

6. As Bosquet explains, “[u]nder the actually existing system of academic work, the university clearly does not prefer the best or most experienced teachers, it prefers the cheapest teachers. Increasingly that means the creation of nontenurable full-time instructorships and other casual appointments, a casualization that has unfolded unevenly by discipline and is especially pronounced in English and writing instruction” (“The Rhetoric of ‘Job Market’” 222).

Works Cited Adler-Kassner, Linda. The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. Utah State UP, 2008.

Babcock, Rebecca Day, and Terese Thonus. Researching the Writing Center: Toward an Evidence-Based Practice.

Peter Lang, 2012.

Boquet, Elizabeth H. “Our Little Secret: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions.”

The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, edited by Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner, Pearson Longman, 2008, pp. 41–60.

Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York UP, 2008.

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66, no. 2, 2003, pp. 207–28.

Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure of the American Association of University Professors. “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” AAUP: American Association of University Professors, https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statementprinciples-academic-freedom-and-tenure. Accessed 4 Sept. 2015.

“Contingent Faculty Positions.” AAUP: American Association of University Professors, www.aaup.org/issues/contingency. Accessed 4 Sept. 2015.

Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-To-One Mentoring. Utah State UP, 2010.

Denny, Harry. “Queering the Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 4th ed., edited

by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, Bedford / St. Martins, 2011, pp. 263–84.

Driscoll, Dana, and Sherry Wynn Perdue. “Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980–2009.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, pp. 11–39.

Hughes, Bradley, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail.

“What They Take With Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010, pp. 12– 46.

Isaacs, Emily, and Melinda Knight. “A Bird’s Eye View of Writing Centers: Institutional Infrastructure, Scope and Programmatic Issues, Reported Practices.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 36–67.

Jensen, Richard J., and John C. Hammerback. “‘Your Tools Are Really the People’: The Rhetoric of Robert Parris Moses.” Communication Monographs, vol. 65, 1998, pp. 126–40.

Kahn, Seth. “What is a Union?” A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators. Parlor Press, 2013, pp. 211– 22.

Malenczyk, Rita, editor. A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators. Parlor Press, 2013.

Malesh, Patricia M., and Sharon McKenzie Stevens.

“Introduction: Active Voices.” Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements, edited by Malesh and Stevens, State U of New York P, 2009, pp. 1–20.

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Utah State UP, 2013.

Naydan, Liliana M. “Leadership as Organizing in the Writing Center.” Academic Exchange Quarterly, vol.

17, no. 4, 2013, pp. 105–10.

“Occupy the Profession!” MLA Democracy, mlademocracy.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/chang e-the-profession-2/comment-page-1/.

“Open Admissions: American Dream or Disaster?” Time, 19 Oct. 1970, p. 81.

“Protecting Academic Freedom.” AAUP: American Association of University Professors, www.aaup.org/our-work/protecting-academicfreedom. Accessed 4 Sept. 2015.

“Shared Governance.” AAUP: American Association of University Professors, www.aaup.org/ourprograms/shared-governance. Accessed 4 Sept.

2015.

Simpson, Jeanne H. “What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns.” International Writing Centers Association, writingcenters.org/what-lies-aheadfor-writing-centers-position-statement-onprofessional-concerns-by-jeanne-h-simpson/.

Accessed 4 Sept. 2015.

Sivakumar, Amrutha. “The Research Difference: How the University varies the value of faculty members.” The Michigan Daily, 19 Mar. 2013, www.michigandaily.com/article/researchdifference-how-university-values-lecturersprofessors-and-faculty.

Staples, Lee. Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing. Praeger, 1984.

“Welcome.” National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, ncptw.chicagolandwritingcenters.org/.

Accessed 4 Sept. 2015.

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ALTERNATIVE VENUES: AN EFL WRITING CENTER OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY Brooke Ricker Schreiber Baruch College, CUNY brooke.schreiber@baruch.cuny.edu Abstract Recent years have seen an increasing presence of writing centers in diverse English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings, particularly in East Asia and in Europe (Bräuer; Chang). These new centers face familiar issues such as a lack of resources, the need to adapt pedagogy to the local context (Reichelt et. al.; Broekhoff), and ideological resistance to the idea of peer learning (Turner) or even providing support for writing at all (Bräuer). In some cases, these difficulties may force potential writing centers to seek a platform entirely outside of the university, bringing both challenges and new possibilities as the center adapts to a community setting and clientele (Rousculp). This article describes the founding of a writing center in Niš, Serbia, in an alternative venue - an American Embassy-funded resource center. This institution has offered significant advantages, including a central location and strong preexisting member base, but it has also shifted the writing center’s focus away from university students towards the diverse writing needs of the broader community. This article discusses how these factors have affected the writing center’s mission, the tutors’ training and experiences, and the development of local pedagogy and concludes with suggestions for other writing center administrators on working in such alternative spaces.

Introduction As English has increasingly become the language of globalization and academic publishing, the demand for students around the world to write in English has begun to outpace educational institutions’ ability to support students who are writing in their second language (their L2) (Maupate-Steiger). Writing centers have sprung up to fill this gap in a wide variety of international contexts, including East Asia (Johnston, Yoshida, and Cornwell; Tan), Europe (Bräuer), and Africa (Broekhoff; Papay). In this expanding literature on writing centers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts, it’s common to find stories of centers which begin with a bare minimum of resources because the universities which house them are unable or unwilling to offer more than minimal support (Broekhoff; Chang; Girgensohn; Papay; Tan). This narrative is perhaps epitomized in the title Melinda Reichelt et al. chose for their article “‘A table and two chairs’: Starting a writing center in Łodz, Poland,” which emphasizes how very little the authors had in terms of practical affordances. Certainly, securing a budget is a problem faced by writing center directors across university contexts; as Mullin et al. note, even a writing center housed within and funded by English

Snežana Đurić University of Niš,#Serbia# djuric.snezana@gmail.com departments must “constantly cobble together a budget” with “any other money it can beg, borrow, or steal” (228). What happens, however, in settings when the lack of resources is coupled with enough resistance to a (literally) foreign idea that permission to open a writing center within the university is simply denied?

What other options might be available to those who want to support writing education, beyond the bounds of the university campus?

In this article, we first describe the process of founding the Niš Writing Center, considering how the alternative venue in which it was hosted impacted the range of potential clients, the recruiting and positioning of tutors, and the center’s pedagogical goals, and how this narrative reflects broader trends in the literature on EFL writing centers. We then examine what benefits and constraints this venue offered, in particular how the American Corner became a stakeholder in the writing center, and how its needs impact the writing center’s practices. Finally, we offer our lessons learned, in the hopes that others interested in founding writing centers might be encouraged to look outside of the academy.

This article originates from a series of conversations between the authors about the writing center’s practices, which began when Brooke arrived in Niš in September 2014 and was invited to act as an advisor to the fledgling center. Those conversations, together with observations by both authors at tutor training and early tutoring sessions, informal interviews with tutors and the American Corner director, and a review of the tutor-training lesson plans and the fall and spring tutoring logs, developed into this coconstructed and critical narrative of the center’s beginnings.

While our focus in this article is on EFL writing center experiences, and on the specific cultural and institutional parameters in which we operate, the process of starting and managing all writing centers involves some common challenges (Broekhoff; Chang). Ultimately, sharing our situated writing center experiences across international boundaries not only validates locally created knowledge about writing and pedagogy (Donahue) but also sets us on a path towards being a truly collaborative international writing center community (Chang).

Alternative Venues • 38

Finding a home In the spring of 2013, while Snežana was an exchange student at a university in upstate New York volunteering at the university’s writing center, she found herself thinking of how much her fellow students at her home university in Niš, Serbia would benefit from a similar service. Snežana initially hoped to locate her writing center in the university in order to follow the model she had become familiar with in the States, in which writing centers specifically support university students’ development of academic skills.

Specifically, the mission of the writing center she envisioned would be to help students in the English department of her university improve their writing skills and later on to serve students from other departments, who are often not taught explicitly how to write academic papers in English.

Thus, upon her return to Niš in the spring of 2013, Snežana contacted two professors in the English department who teach academic writing courses. The professors were cautiously enthusiastic about the idea of creating a writing center to support the department’s students, and agreed to propose the idea at the department faculty meeting. However, the department refused the request, which the professors reported was due to lack of physical space and funds to pay tutors, without which tutors would be unlikely to remain interested in tutoring.

This resistance reflects some larger issues in writing center administration. First, a lack of funding is a common, persistent, and powerful concern for writing centers around the globe (Broekhoff; Mullin et al.; Reichelt et al.). Funding is needed for training and paying tutors, purchasing supplies, and compensating a director, as well as securing physical space, which enables a center to flourish (Papay; Girgensohn 133).

As a result, Simpson notes, writing center directors must be attentive to university administration’s budgets, which “drive all power, all decision making, and all priorities” (202). In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings, as is likely true in this case, a lack of funding for writing centers is tied to a low prioritization of literacy instruction within universities (Reichelt et al. 10).

Second, particularly with writing centers in EFL settings, administrators very often encounter some degree of ideological resistance from faculty and administration. Writing center pedagogy may be totally unfamiliar to instructors as well as students, and even incompatible with local understandings of writing instruction, which may be product-oriented or focused on exam requirements (Reichelt et al. 279). In addition, by its very nature writing center work replaces

hierarchical learning with peer learning, which can be highly threatening to the academic power structures (Girgensohn 129). This threat may well have been a reason for the university’s refusal. Finally, as a student, Snežana lacked the institutional status and departmental connections that a tenured faculty member might have, which smooth the path of founding and maintaining a writing center (Mullin et al.

228). Together, these factors create an all too common situation in which Snežana was faced with administrative roadblocks: “in a slow-moving bureaucracy,” Mullin et al. point out, writing center directors as “internal agents of change” may “face frustration, [and] can be silenced for their innovative spirit” (227).

The alternative venue Snežana remained determined to create the support she had envisioned for the writing education of her fellow students in, and later beyond, the English department. After considering her options, she decided to approach another institution which supports English language education: The American Corner.

American Corners are Embassy-sponsored resource centers and libraries, managed by local staff, typically experienced English instructors from the community.

Their stated aim is “to promote mutual understanding” between the people of the host country and the United States and “to reinforce intercultural exchange and friendship” (Embassy of the United States – Serbia).

American Corners provide support for both visiting scholars and local workshops in language, culture, and pedagogy, and their mission is primarily to attract as many community members as possible through their programs.

Snežana, who had been a volunteer for the American Corner during her university studies and knew the staff well, first approached the director of the American Corner Niš about her idea. Specifically, she proposed having a writing center hosted by the American Corner, and in preparation, Snežana would plan and teach a series of workshops on academic writing, open to the general public, from which tutors would be recruited. This American Corner had previously hosted well-received workshops on creative writing, and with increasing interest in studying abroad throughout the community, they were open to further projects involving English-language academic skills.

The director thought that this project in particular would open the doors of the American Corner to a more diverse audience and “gather a community of reading and writing lovers” (personal communication).

In other words, the writing center project aligned

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Alternative Venues • 39 neatly with the American Corner’s goals of engaging more members of the community and followed their existing model for programming: bringing in volunteer instructors and using the existing space, which meant no additional cost to them. As will be discussed further below, this institutional alignment created both great benefits and potential dangers, challenging how the writing center was conceptualized in terms of its tutors, clientele, and overall mission.

Tutor training One of the most visible initial effects of moving outside of the university was a shift in the tutor population. In contrast to EFL writing centers housed in universities, which can draw potential tutors from more experienced students in departments of English, Snežana needed to recruit tutors from the general community. Thus, she and the American Corner staff planned a two-part recruitment process –a lengthy academic writing workshop followed by a two-day tutor training session. First, the American Corner advertised a free “academic writing workshop” to its members via posters and social media. The writing workshop attracted fifteen initial participants, including high school students, university students, and employed middle-aged men and women, none with much formal knowledge of how to write in English.

The workshop itself consisted of hour-and-a-half long weekly sessions and lasted for nine months, covering topics such as the structure and types of academic essays, more general genres like reviews and cover letters, and the writing process, including peer review. At the conclusion of this demanding workshop, only four participants remained: one high school student and three university students, two in psychology and one in math. These four participants were then invited to become tutors; all accepted, and they went through the final two-day training which included discussions on tutoring techniques, mock tutoring sessions, and addressing the tutors’ questions and concerns.

In the fall of 2014, the tutors and American Corner staff worked together to promote the center.

The American Corner advertised the center on their Facebook page as well as through their partnerships with local media, and the tutors hung posters in high schools and colleges and spread the word amongst their peers. The advertising push focused primarily on spreading information about the purpose of a writing center and how it works, thereby “involv[ing] itself in the perennial exercise of explaining writing center work” (Reichelt et al. 281). The Niš Writing Center

opened on October 15, 2014, and has been working ever since.

Impact of the location: benefits and challenges As Tiffany Rousculp notes, community writing centers are deeply influenced not only by the urban area they serve, but also by their specific locations in community spaces or in public libraries, which can shift clientele, partnerships, and ultimately the goals for the writing center’s programming. In particular, because the institutions in which community writing centers are housed are already affiliated with some sectors of the community, the writing center is in danger of being “co-opted” by those groups (in Rousculp’s case, the educated middle class, rather than the disenfranchised she had intended to serve) or by the goals of the institution itself (Rousculp 132).

Likewise, Simpson describes how writing centers and the institutions which host them are interdependent: writing centers must always consider how the institutions’ administrators are constrained by “laws and policies, by supervising bodies, by precedent, by public expectations, and by budgets” (200). Thus, although this alternative venue has offered significant benefits to the Niš Writing Center, operating in this space outside the university has also had some drawbacks, namely struggles with the diversity of its clientele and an isolation from some types of academic resources.

Benefits of the American Corner location The center is situated in the library section of the American Corner’s office, equipped with tables, chairs, and computers. In addition to this physical space, ideally located in the center of the city, the center also has access to the American Corner’s many writing books and other material necessary for working with clients, which otherwise would be difficult to obtain.

The American Corner also gave the opening of the writing center a large initial outreach, not only via its own members and the visitors to its frequent programs, but also (as discussed above) through its social media sites and established connections with local media.

Diversity of clients Because the American Corner is open to the general community, so is the writing center, and the diversity of potential clients has profoundly shaped the writing center’s pedagogy in several ways. First, clients from the community often do not have a specific assignment or writing task, and may not have a clear

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Alternative Venues • 40 goal for coming to the center beyond simply improving their English – again, the writing center model is unfamiliar in this context. Clients thus frequently expect tutors to generate assignments and produce brief lessons for them, casting the tutors into a teaching role. For example, clients often expected tutors to spend sessions selecting and explaining grammar points, such as the sequence of tenses, and then creating tasks for the clients to practice that grammar.

While this teaching role has the benefit of counteracting the idea of a writing center as simply a place for proofreading (see, for example, Broekhoff 73), it challenges the novice tutors, who were trained primarily in academic writing based on Snežana’s experiences in the United States. More focused clients might come to work on a very wide variety of writing tasks, including business e-mails, job applications, the GRE and TOEFL tests, and even personal blog writing. With such a diverse clientele, the tutors’ preparation in academic essay types is sometimes insufficient, and in contrast with a university setting, tutors are not able to specialize in a particular area (such as technical writing or graduate student writing).

Finally, clients from the general community are often much older than the student-age tutors, which has sometimes led to discomfort on both sides, given the hierarchical nature of Serbian society.

These issues highlight the need for writing center pedagogy, especially in EFL settings, to be adapted to the local context. In addition to adapting pedagogy for English language learners, EFL writing centers must often provide a greater breadth of language support than their North American counterparts, including assistance with reading, applying for study abroad, and preparing for tests such as TOEFL and TOEIC (Johnston, Yoshida, and Cornwell). In some institutional settings, the writing centers adapt by having faculty members act as tutors (Tan 405), which leaves the traditional arrangement of intellectual authority more or less intact.

Isolation from tutoring resources As the American Corner is an established institution with its own goals and policies, the Writing Center has had to work within its requirements, mission, and goals – as is common for communitybased writing centers internationally (Rousculp). One example of this is the access the American Corner provides to its library of English-language materials, which includes not only periodicals and fiction, but also many references and textbooks on grammar, vocabulary, and academic writing. These materials are

relatively hard to come by in Serbia and a fledgling writing center would not be able to easily replicate this collection of resources – a profound benefit.

However, the American Corner has a limited amount of Embassy funding to order new books every year, and the texts selected must reflect the needs and requests of the American Corner’s general membership – meaning that highest priority usually goes to new works of popular literature and test prep materials.

Thus, there are as yet no tutoring guides or handbooks, materials which would certainly help in training and supporting the novice tutors, in the American Corner’s existing library. Despite their generous offer of space, materials, and experience, the American Corner staff’s first concern must be their own membership.

As Mullin et al. point out, “the downside of a location outside a traditional academic unit is isolation” (232), and this is doubly so for a location entirely outside the university. First, though the community clients have benefitted from the center’s services, it has been more difficult to reach the university student community. Without an independent advertising budget, news about the center is primarily spread by social media and word of mouth, and this process has been steady but slow. More significantly, being disconnected from academia, without the support of a writing program administrator or faculty members, also means that the writing center tutors tend not to have knowledge of or access to current publications or opportunities for professional development such as writing center conferences – which puts the tutors at a disadvantage. The American Corner is able to help the writing center overcome some, but certainly not all, of the hurdles of limited financial resources (Reichelt et al.).

Current practices and future directions Overall, the mission of the writing center has broadened significantly from a focus on assisting university students studying English in improving writing skills, to a broader goal of developing and improving English writing skills in the general community, working with genres from academic and creative writing to e-mails and blogs. The Writing Center in Niš has now been operating for nearly three years, and is currently open once a week for three hours, with at least two tutors available for drop-in consulting. The Center has had an average of four clients per week, with many returning clients, and has focused on expanding its hours, increasing its client base, and improving its pedagogy. To that end, Snežana and the tutors created an official email account and a Facebook page for the center, and the

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Alternative Venues • 41 tutors visited high schools and university departments in the city to conduct short presentations about the center’s services. Taking advantage of their positioning within the American Corner, they advertised to members attending TOEFL prep classes and other programming. The center also decided to increase their online presence by creating a writing center blog featuring a monthly writing competition in which winning work is posted on the writing center blog and shared on other social media.

The Niš Writing Center also recruited three new tutors through a new process which does away with the extensive nine-month training workshop. Instead, the call for new tutors was announced through social media, and potential tutors were selected after a review of their submitted writing samples and informal interviews. The new tutors then observed tutoring sessions and attended a one-day training organized by the current tutors. The entire recruitment process has been a valuable experience for the current tutors, who trained new staff in an authentic peer-to-peer manner, building their confidence and knowledge (Girgensohn 132). Finally, Snežana and the tutors made handouts with writing exercises that are specific to clients’ needs.

For example, one of the clients had difficulty with writing coherent and cohesive paragraphs, so a tutor who worked with him regularly found an exercise in which the client had to put sentences of a paragraph in order and insert linking words where necessary. This exercise became the basis for a handout on improving paragraph cohesion. In EFL writing centers, pedagogical innovation is often driven by student tutors, who not only help develop a locally-appropriate pedagogy (Girgensohn), but can also help to spur changes in institutional culture by promoting peer-topeer learning (Bräuer 470). In addition, tutors who share a common first language with their clients have a profound awareness of which textual structures and rhetorical patterns in the second language (L2) may prove problematic for learners, and are therefore ideally positioned to help customize tutoring materials and practices (Maupate-Steiger). For the Niš Writing Center, producing a set of customized teaching materials helps to make writing center pedagogy locally appropriate; making and working with these handouts helps the tutors learn about writing pedagogy as they match specific exercises to clients’ needs, and simultaneously empowers them to shape the development of their own center.

What we’ve learned The alternative venue provided by the American Corner has made the Writing Center in Niš a reality, while at the same time shifting its focus away from the narrow confines of the university towards the needs of the broader community, and, as a result, shaping its practices from recruitment to pedagogy—a process which will be familiar to those in community-based writing centers internationally (Rousculp). Though the center’s work has not been without difficulty, we argue that our experiences have several implications for the work of writing centers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings, as well as in community settings in the U.S. First, we argue that, though it carries challenges, being housed in a more general purpose resource center is in many ways a natural match for EFL writing centers, which frequently must take on a broader language-support mission than their North American peers (Johnston, Yoshida, and Cornwell). This alternative positioning both permits and encourages the creativity to adapt to that broader mission, and also allows the center to reach out to potential clients through the range of services already offered in general purpose language resource centers, such as TOEFL and GRE test prep classes.

Additionally, for EFL writing centers, moving to an alternative venue can enable the writing center to sidestep ideological resistance put up by the university and to fully explore the benefits of peer learning without threatening the deeply-rooted educational hierarchy which limits writing center practice in some contexts (Broekhoff; Johnston, Yoshida, and Cornwell; Turner). As Bräuer writes, ‘‘peer learning, as part of writing center work . . . can lead not only to a change of individual writing practices, but also to a change in the role of writing—and maybe even to alternative writing cultures within institutions” (470). While the Niš Writing Center’s positioning outside of the university means that it does not have an immediate impact on the academic writing culture in Niš, it is working actively to educate the general community and to reach out to students through informal networks.

Finally, the partnership between the American Corner’s local staff and Snežana, an exchange student turned administrator, means that the center is drawing on both international funding and writing center modelsas well as local cultural and educational knowledge. This combination is precisely what enabled the writing center to adapt to the needs of the clientele and their individual priorities about what, when, and how they should write, as Rousculp emphasizes all writing center educators should do (126). We suggest

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Alternative Venues • 42 that, despite the isolation it entails, the location beyond the university has the advantage of a deep flexibility, which other writing center directors weighed down by administrative constraints (Simpson; Mullin et al.) might value. After reflecting on the process of establishing this center, the authors offer the following suggestions, in the hopes that others in EFL settings (and anyone facing bureaucratic hurdles) might be encouraged to look beyond the university. We focus on developing a local practice and on sustainability because, as Broekhoff points out, “local sustainability will determine the long-term value of all your effort” (75).

Works Cited

Sustainability •

•

•

Select a venue whose mission aligns with writing center work. In our case, the connection was through drawing in more members interested in improving academic English skills. Other alignments might include an interest in test preparation (as at a private language school), or in education more broadly (as at a public library).

Educate clients. Whether through advertising or in person when clients arrive, educating potential clients about the writing center philosophy and services helps to keep the center a place for educating writers.

Create your own pool of potential tutors.

Consider how you might entice potential tutors with courses in writing to build up their own skills first, and emphasize a variety of genres of writing in your training – but keep in mind that lengthy or extensive training can be a deterrent to community members with busy schedules.

Developing a local practice •

•

Postscript: In the time since this article was written, Snežana has completed her undergraduate and master's degrees and moved on to full-time employment. She then passed control of the writing center to the tutors she had trained, who took on the task of training future tutors. This process illustrates the deep importance for the sustainability of a community-based center of training staff with an eye towards administrative work, so that, as in the world of non-profits, the organization does not end with the departure of the original leader.

Collect data from the very beginning. Simpson argues that “Next to managing the budget, data gathering is the most important task of writing center directors” (211). Keeping track of clients’ backgrounds and needs – Snežana did this through a tutoring log – allows tutors and administrators not only to determine progress and verify success (Simpson), but also to customize and improve their pedagogy.

Transfer responsibility for training to the tutors. As tutors increase in skill and confidence, they can benefit from directing the training themselves, which eases the director’s workload but more importantly keeps the pedagogy in the hands of those who share linguistic and cultural background with the clients.

Bräuer, Gerd. “Section Essay: Academic Literacy Development.” Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places, edited by Chris Thaiss, Gerd Bräuer, Paula Carlino, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, and Aparna Sinha, The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2012, pp. 467-484.

Broekhoff, Marna. “A Tale of Two Writing Centers in Namibia: Lessons for Us All.” Journal of Academic Writing, vol. 4, no.1, 2014, pp. 66-78.

Chang, Tzu-Shan. "The Idea of a Writing Center in Asian Countries: The Preliminary Search of a Model in Taiwan." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013, www.praxisuwc.com/chang102/. Accessed May 2015.

Donahue, Christiane. “‘Internationalization’ and Composition Studies: Reorienting the Discourse.”

College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 212-244.

Embassy of the United States –Serbia. American Corners Serbia, 2015, serbia.usembassy.gov. Accessed 20 May 2015.

Girgensohn, Katrin. “Mutual Growing: How Student Experience Can Shape Writing Centers.”Journal of Academic Writing, vol.2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 127-137.

Johnston, Scott, Hiroko Yoshida, and Steve Cornwell.

"Forum: Writing Centers and Tutoring in Japan and Asia." JALT Conference Proceedings – JALT2009, Shizuoka, edited by Alan M. Stoke, JALT, 2010.

Maupaté-Steiger, Kerstin. “Tongue versus Terrain: Considering the Positive Effects of Nonnative Speakers as Writing Consultants for L2 Students.”

Zeitschrift Schreiben, vol. 29, no. 9, 2014, pp. 1-7.

Mullin, Joan et al. “Administrative (Chaos) Theory: The Politics and Practices of Writing Center Location.” The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book, edited by Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006, pp. 225236.

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Alternative Venues • 43 Papay, Twila Yates. “Collaborating with a Difference: How a South African Writing Center Brings Comfort to the Contact One.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5-22.

Reichelt, Melinda, et al. “‘A table and two chairs’: Starting a Writing Center in Łódź, Poland.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 22, no. 3, 2013, pp.

277-285.

Rousculp, Tiffany. Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center. NCTE, 2014.

Simpson, Jeanne. “Managing Encounters with Central Administration.” The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book, edited by Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006, pp. 199-214.

Tan, Bee-Hoon. “Innovating Writing Centers and Online Writing Labs outside North America.” The Asian EFL Journal Quarterly, vol.13, no. 2, 2011, pp.390-418.

Turner, Adam. “Re-engineering the North American Writing Center Model in East Asia.”Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, www.praxisuwc.com/new-page-81. Accessed May 2015.

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A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO GRADUATE WRITING GROUPS: FACILITATOR, FIRST MEETING, AND FEEDBACK STRUCTURE Claire McMurray University of Kansas mcmurrayclaire@ku.edu Abstract Scholarship on writing groups has long documented the benefits that grow from writers meeting regularly to share feedback, gain accountability, and encourage one another. However, some groups flounder and some flourish, and little research exists on the reasons for such failures or successes. This leaves few resources for writing group facilitators attempting to create bonds among group members, keep members on task, create accountability, counter absenteeism, and the like. The present article explains how the author, a graduate writing group facilitator struggling with these issues, drew from survey data taken from group participants and interviews with facilitators to create a systematic approach to writing group facilitation in order to improve group functioning.

This new approach revealed three main factors upon which graduate groups’ success hinges: 1) the role of the group’s facilitator 2) the group’s first meeting, and 3) the group’s workshopping/feedback structure. All three factors are explored and recommendations are given for improving in each area.

As the graduate writing specialist on staff at a Midwestern university writing center, I create, coordinate, and lead a series of graduate writing groups on campus. Though a rewarding experience overall, I have seen groups both flourish and collapse and have become curious about what might lead to such successes and failures. After trying a variety of group feedback structures, collecting survey data from students, and interviewing facilitators, I believe that there are three major areas that, when maximized, increase graduate writing groups’ effectiveness: 1) a trained, prepared facilitator; 2) a structured first meeting; and 3) an effective method for giving and getting feedback.

In this article, I outline my initial struggles in these three areas before offering lessons learned about how to train writing group facilitators, take full advantage of the group’s first meeting, and choose a feedback structure that works well. This essay’s main intent is to provide information for facilitators who might be struggling with creating or maintaining a graduate writing group.

Writing Groups in the Literature Writing scholars and researchers have documented the many benefits of writing groups for all types of writers. Unlike traditional one-on-one tutoring sessions, writing groups harness the power of peer !

interaction among multiple members and offer sustained support (Phillips 1). Writing groups are, by their very nature, social and interactive endeavors.

They follow a dialogic model of collaboration, challenging the dominant view of the writer as solitary, and of feedback structures as rigid and hierarchical.

This way of communicating is fluid and open to multiple voices and to multiple writers’ and readers’ strengths (Lunsford and Ede 235-236). The act of critiquing others’ work also serves as a valuable strategy for learning to write (Aitchison “Writing Groups” 914) and forces members to reflect on writing itself, which creates metacognition about the writing process (Ruggles Gere and Abbott 375).

The literature on writing groups also helps us to characterize and distinguish between types of groups.

Sarah Haas has created a useful typology for writing groups, organizing them by eleven dimensions: purpose, membership, leadership, contact, time, place, frequency, length, duration, in-meeting activities, and between-meeting activities. Scholars also highlight the distinct division between writing groups inside and outside of the classroom (Highberg et al. 6). Much of the research on classroom-based groups focuses on groups at the undergraduate level. A growing body of literature also explores writing groups for students at the graduate level. Scholars note how these types of groups are often voluntary, highly variable, and embedded in a variety of contexts: formal, ad hoc, or even external to academic institutions (Aitchison “Learning Together” 83). Because most of these groups operate outside of the classroom they may be run by a variety of facilitators—writing center staff, faculty, or a fellow graduate student—or may operate without a leader at all.

Writing groups have particular benefits for graduate students. Groups can fill gaps in writing instruction at the graduate level (Maher et al. 264).

They do so by improving writing group members’ knowledge about genres in their discipline and helping these students become “rhetorically-savvy” writers and readers (Gradin et al. 5). In addition, groups can serve as places for graduate students to “practic[e] and communicat[e] with other external scholarly communities” (Aitchison, “Learning Together” 89).

A Systematic Approach to Graduate Writing Groups • 45 Writing groups are also flexible. They can offer tailored support to graduate students by focusing on themes or issues pertinent to this population, such as thesis writing or writing for publication (Aitchison, “Learning Together” 83). Groups can allow members to explore the “psychological factors which influence writing practices” and can offer graduate students a way to combat the self-doubt and anxiety that often appear during the thesis and dissertation writing process (Ferguson 287). Finally, groups can help graduate students with the “successful and timely completion of [their] doctoral work” and can aid with the transition from dissertation to publication (Maher et al. 264).

Writing groups can thus support students from the beginning to the end of their graduate careers.

Graduate writing groups, though very useful, are a particularly precarious endeavor. These writing groups can easily collapse and disband because they often “hing[e] on regular attendance” and on their members’ intrinsic motivation to participate (Ferguson 293).

Graduate writing groups can also suffer from a range of other problems, such as personality conflicts, sporadic attendance, high attrition, misaligned expectations among members, and members’ inexperience with the peer review process. Only a small number of scholars have explored the ways any type of writing group can go wrong. For example, Diane George includes “dysfunctional” writing groups in her typology, and Sandra Nelson and Douglas Smith study ways to minimize conflict in groups (qtd. in Speck et al.

66). Other scholars have also briefly discussed topics such as sporadic attendance in voluntary writing groups (Fitzgerald et al. 138), underprepared instructors/facilitators (Ruggles Gere 103), lack of institutional support for groups, difficulty starting and maintaining groups, and misconceptions about writing groups’ effectiveness (Starke-Meyerring 75-78).

Unfortunately, this body of research on writing groups remains relatively small.

This gap in the literature on writing group difficulties is understandable. It can be a challenge to collect data and feedback from dissatisfied participants and writing group dropouts. Even when participants are willing to discuss negative experiences, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how a group went off course and opinions about this may vary greatly among group members. Despite these obstacles, however, I feel strongly that we must pursue this line of research more deeply. As scholars, we need to acknowledge and examine the many ways in which graduate writing groups can falter. Only by doing so can we begin to address the needs of the many facilitators and graduate students who are struggling to create and maintain their own groups.

I have chosen to add my voice to this very small body of literature because one of my own graduate groups failed to operate effectively. This led me to analyze the reasons for its dysfunction and to explore ways to lead more successful groups in the future.

Three factors emerged clearly from my writing group experience and research. I discovered the important roles played by a graduate writing group’s facilitator, by its first meeting, and by its feedback structure.

A Haphazard Difficulties

Approach

and

Initial

When I began my duties as a Graduate Writing Specialist in the fall of 2013, I facilitated a thesis/dissertation writing group made up of graduate students from a variety of disciplines and different levels of study. It was a frustrating endeavor. I allowed people to join throughout the year and students attended haphazardly or simply dropped out without warning. I sensed that we had gotten off on the wrong foot without any clear guidelines or expectations, and that the way the group shared documents and feedback could use improvement. Students gave each other feedback during the group’s meetings without having read anything ahead of time, which made the feedback rushed and superficial. Perhaps most frustratingly, I was unfamiliar with writing groups myself and felt unprepared to serve as the group’s facilitator. I was at a loss as to how to steer the group back on course.

A New, Systematic Approach My group was still barely limping along when, in the summer of 2014, our writing center received funding from the Office of Graduate Studies to run writing groups for graduate fellowship recipients.

These were discipline-specific, face-to-face, limitedduration groups for graduate students. I spearheaded this initiative and used the opportunity to take a more systematic approach to group formation, facilitator training, and assessment. The twelve students were put into four weekly writing groups, according to their discipline, for seven weeks. Pre- and post-group surveys were created to gather data and feedback from participants. I held formal training for the three writing center graduate tutors who, in addition to myself, served as the group facilitators. The four of us met periodically to exchange ideas and thoughts, and I also interviewed each facilitator individually.

Based on our survey results and personal experiences, the facilitators and I considered this new writing group approach a success. On the post-group surveys 10 of the 12 participants rated the groups as helping them work toward their goals “very much” and

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A Systematic Approach to Graduate Writing Groups • 46 as helping them with their writing struggles. Eleven of the 12 said they would recommend a writing group to others, and many made positive comments about the experience and the groups.

Writing Group Facilitators Because of my previous struggles as a facilitator and because writing group facilitation differs so much from one-on-one peer consulting, I did formal training with my facilitators-to-be. With their input, I created a multipronged, interactive approach to facilitation. This approach included: 1) completing a set of background readings, 2) attending a formal training meeting, 3) attending a mid-semester meeting and end-of-semester meeting, 4) checking in frequently with me, 5) sharing resources and activities with other facilitators by email or during meetings, and 6) observing other facilitators’ groups, when possible.1 This method relied heavily on our network of facilitators and was collaborative rather than hierarchical. Though I served as a mentor, the most useful elements of the approach were putting facilitators in contact with one another and giving them the opportunity to share their struggles, experiences, and ideas.

Our formal training covered as much ground as possible. We began by discussing practicalities such as setting expectations and guidelines, helping participants select a feedback structure, creating a group schedule, and administering pre-surveys. Based on the set of readings that facilitators had already completed, we also had a more theoretical discussion about the benefits of writing groups, possible pitfalls, the role of the facilitator, and group cohesion. In addition, we talked about ways to explain and model effective feedback. Lastly, we all prepared for our groups’ first meetings by creating an agenda and reviewing the handouts we would give to our participants.

As the summer continued I conducted individual interviews with the three other facilitators to see how they were putting their training into practice. I was not surprised when two common themes emerged: the role of the writing group facilitator and how this role differed from that of the one-on-one peer consultant.

Unfortunately, very little scholarship describes the writing group facilitator role in detail, though Fitzgerald, Mulvihill, and Dobson offer a brief description (134) and Graham, Hayden, and Swinehart discuss it in the classroom setting (7-8). When I spoke with the facilitators they all discussed the nuanced and flexible role that they had to play in their writing groups. They also stressed that they had to constantly shift from one task to another. The facilitators had to keep an eye on the clock, take the emotional “pulse” of

the group, catch problems with the group’s functioning, help members to troubleshoot issues, and interpret and model feedback about members’ writing.

Facilitator 1 remarked upon his “hybrid role” and how it seemed to be a mixture of a collaborative, coconsulting model and a more assertive teaching position. Along with the challenges they noted, two facilitators also mentioned the unexpected rewards that came with the role. Facilitator 2 highlighted the satisfying social bonds that emerged from sustained contact with the same set of students, and Facilitator 1 appreciated the in-depth view he gained of each group member’s field of study. In the end, all three facilitators discovered they had an exhausting but rewarding balancing act to maintain. They had to keep things running smoothly by constantly adjusting to group fluctuations and needs. It was an extremely challenging, valuable, and dynamic experience.

The Importance of the First Meeting The facilitators and I prepared so thoroughly in part because we knew we had to be ready for the group’s most crucial meeting—its first. We hoped that setting goals, guidelines, and feedback structures from the very beginning would help create accountability and cohesion in the groups and set them up for success. We saw the group’s first meeting as similar to the agenda setting portion of a writing consultation because it sets the goals and expectations among participants. It also allows members “to make a firm decision from the outset as to whether they can realistically commit to the group” (Ferguson 293). The facilitators and I discovered that members benefitted from a direct, explicit, and collaborative discussion about what the group envisioned for itself, its feedback structure, and what members expected of each other.

We found that if a member missed the opportunity to participate in this active decision-making process, the group ran a higher risk of misaligned expectations.

This was the case for the only student who dropped out of our summer writing group program. Though her largest complaint was that her group’s initial goals were not met, she did not attend the first meeting and missed the chance to actively participate in creating those goals.

We found that there were both administrative and emotional components to the group’s first day. On a practical level, facilitators provided members with an organized agenda and helpful documents. We came to the first meeting with copies of a group pledge, a document outlining different structures for members to get and give feedback, a list of writing group benefits, an article explaining how to give constructive

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A Systematic Approach to Graduate Writing Groups • 47 feedback, and a writing group pre-survey that asked members to document their expectations, writing habits, struggles, and measurable goals. The facilitators used each document as a starting point for discussion on a variety of key topics. In particular, we found that deciding upon a structure for getting and giving feedback, an attendance policy, a meeting schedule, and a list of group goals was essential. Some facilitators also circulated abstracts of each member’s writing project and used a sample text to model how to give constructive feedback. We facilitators played a clearly professional role at this point: distributing documents, collecting the pre-surveys and pledges, and answering members’ questions. As a follow-up we wrote up and circulated a summary of all guidelines, policies, schedules, and structures the group created together.

In addition to these administrative duties, however, the facilitators and I found we also had to attend to several significant emotional factors, which were equally important but less systematically planned and implemented. The first meeting became vital for creating rapport, comfort, and cohesion among members. This was achieved by assisting with introductions, creating ice breakers, and allowing everyone time to chat as the meetings began and ended. One of the facilitators noted how, on the first day, she served as the group’s “emotional watchdog” by keeping an eye on group dynamics in order to catch problems early (Facilitator 2). Though the list of tasks for the first meeting might seem long, we found that all were important investments in the group’s future.

Writing Group Structures Of all the topics covered during the groups’ first meetings we found the most important to be feedback structure. Each group chose its own particular way of giving and receiving feedback among members. For the most part the facilitators and I had to learn through trial and error what feedback structures existed as well as which worked well and which did not. Several scholars briefly describe their writing group’s setup, such as academic discipline, number of members, and weekly hours met (Gradin et al. 1; Pololi et al. 64).

However, few detail how the group got and gave feedback and whether this structure functioned effectively. One exception is Therese Ferguson, who lists the thematic focus of each group meeting, recommended readings, and peer-critique exercises (288-289). Other helpful resources are online guides such as “Activities for Writing Groups,” which explain how to share and respond to writing.

Though at first glance choosing a structure might appear simple, we discovered the many choices

involved: when to read documents, how to share materials, how to share the feedback itself, whether or not to create a workshopping schedule, how much time (if any) to spend on writing versus getting/giving feedback, and whether the group should focus on certain writing genres or topics. Each group carefully weighed whether or not to read work prior to meeting times. The groups also chose among the many options for sharing materials and feedback comments: projectors, paper copies, emails, and file sharing methods like Google docs. Group members decided whether they wanted a more formal “feedback calendar” so that members were scheduled to submit writing on certain days or if they preferred sharing on an informal, volunteer basis. Some of the groups were also open to the idea of inviting guests to teach or lecture about pertinent topics. In our natural sciences writing group, guests demonstrated how to use a popular scientific document preparation system and lectured about electronic dissertation formatting. Most importantly, each group had to decide whether or not to focus on workshopping documents together or on using the meeting time to write. The decision appeared to hinge on how much value members put on simply creating accountability for themselves or on their eagerness to improve their own writing. Most of our groups chose to mix the two structures, using half their time to write and then the other half to workshop their writing. When workshopping, members either discussed drafts together as a group or met in pairs.

Though we discovered many successful methods for sharing writing and comments, we found at least one method that impeded the smooth functioning of our groups. As with the first group I facilitated, one of our summer groups decided not to read any writing ahead of time and simply to give feedback while reading documents aloud during the meeting. The members of this group did not want to limit the number of documents workshopped and attempted to read and comment upon every member’s drafts each time they met. Members later reported they felt rushed and unprepared during meetings, and the group’s facilitator noted that members focused on lower order concerns and failed to provide one another with thoughtful and useful analysis. Consequently, the group lost a member and received more negative survey results than the others. At the end of the summer all of the writing group facilitators decided not to offer this feedback structure as a possibility to other groups in the future.

We found that no one structure fit all groups and that group members could be infinitely creative when choosing how, when, and whether to give and receive feedback. By the end of the summer, we were

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A Systematic Approach to Graduate Writing Groups • 48 convinced that graduate writing groups could function within a wide array of structures as long as members were clear on the possibilities available to them and agreed on one together.

Conclusion Since the summer of 2014, we have greatly expanded our graduate writing groups program. We have run 59 groups, and I have trained 34 facilitators.

We continue to offer several discipline-specific groups each semester and have also created groups specifically for multilingual students. Additionally, we have established “accountability” groups which allow students to use the entire meeting time to write. I continue to hone our graduate writing group facilitator training program, relying heavily on our experienced facilitators. The lessons we learned in our first summer about the role of the facilitator, the first meeting, and feedback structures still hold remarkably true today.

Because of the constantly shifting nature of writing groups, we are far from finished learning about them.

We find ourselves caught in a fascinating and likely unending cycle of observation, reflection, implementation, and adjustment. As constant works in progress, our graduate writing groups continue to create joy and satisfaction, as well as occasional frustration, for our facilitators and group members.

Admittedly, we still come across issues related to absenteeism, accountability, and misaligned expectations. However, we have greatly improved the overall functioning and continuity of our groups through thoughtful planning and organization. We have found that when you let a graduate writing group evolve naturally, it can easily devolve; a systematic approach, however, sets the group up for success.

As we continue our journey, I remain curious about several underexplored avenues of writing group research, such as more ways to improve attendance rates and feelings of accountability, additional methods for training facilitators, and ways to maximize group cohesion. It is my hope that, true to the collaborative spirit of writing groups, colleagues running graduate writing groups in other settings will continue to contribute their experiences, research, and lessons learned to this conversation in progress.

Notes 1. Set of background readings for facilitator training: The ‘Write’ Skills and More: A Thesis Writing Group for Doctoral Students covers benefits of groups, group logistics, group structures, and possible pitfalls.

“Making a Thesis or Dissertation Support Group

Work for You” offers suggestions about providing effective feedback. “Guidelines for Writing Groups” provides writing group activities. “The Role of the Facilitator,” written by one of our former facilitators, gives a peer-to-peer view of facilitating groups at our institution. “Writing Groups,” written by myself, gives an overview of my own lessons learned as a facilitator and a discussion of creating cohesion in writing groups.

Works Cited “Activities for Writing Groups.” The Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/writinggroups/activities-for-writing-groups/. Accessed 2 Aug. 2016.

Aitchison, Claire. “Writing Groups for Doctoral Education.” Studies in Higher Education, vol. 34, no.

8, Dec. 2009, pp. 905-916. ProQuest, doi:10.1080/03075070902785580.

-------. “Learning Together to Publish: Writing Group Pedagogies for Doctoral Publishing.” Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond, edited by Claire Aitchison, Barbara Kamler, and Alison Lee, Routledge, 2010, pp. 83-100.

Facilitator 1. Personal Interview. 2 July 2014.

Facilitator 2. Personal Interview. 2 July 2014.

Ferguson, Therese. “The ‘Write’ Skills and More: A Thesis Writing Group for Doctoral Students.”

Journal of Geography in Higher Education, vol. 33, no.

2, May 2009, pp. 288297, doi:10.1080/03098260902734968.

Fitzgerald, Sallyanne, et al. “Meeting the Needs of Graduate Students: Writing Support Groups in the Center.” The Writing Center New Directions, edited by Ray Wallace and Jeanne Simpson, Garland P Inc., 1991, pp. 133-144.

George, Diane. “Working with Peer Groups in the Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 35, no. 3, Oct. 1984, pp. 320326. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/357460.

Gradin, Sherrie, et al. “Disciplinary Differences, Rhetorical Resonances: Graduate Writing Groups Beyond the Humanities.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1-5.

Graham, Kathryn, et al. “Writing Without Teachers, Writing With Tutors.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol.

18, no. 7, March 1994, pp. 7-8, wlnjournal.org/archives/v18/18-7.pdf.

Haas, Sarah. “Pick-n-Mix: A Typology of Writers’ Groups in Use.” Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond, edited by Claire Aitchison and Cally Guerin, Routledge, 2014, pp. 30-47.

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A Systematic Approach to Graduate Writing Groups • 49 Highberg, Nels, et al. “Introduction: Writing Groups as Literacy Events.” Writing Groups: Inside and Outside the Classroom, edited by Beverly Moss, Nels Highberg, and Melissa Nicolas, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1-10.

Lunsford, Andrea and Lisa Ede. “Rhetoric in a New Key: Women and Collaboration.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 8, no. 2, Spring 1990, pp. 234-241.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/465595.

Maher, Damian, et al. “‘Becoming and Being Writers’: The Experiences of Doctoral Students in Writing Groups.” Studies in Continuing Education, vol. 30, no.

3, 2008, pp. 263-275.

Phillips, Talinn. “Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers from Student to Scholar.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-7.

Pololi, Linda, et al. “Facilitating Scholarly Writing in Academic Medicine: Lessons Learned From a Collaborative Peer Mentoring Program.” Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 19, no. 1, Jan. 2004, pp. 64-68. ProQuest, doi:10.1111/j.15251497.2004.21143x.

Ruggles Gere, Anne. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Ruggles Gere, Anne and Robert Abbott. “Talking About Writing: The Language of Writing Groups.”

Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 9, no. 4, Dec. 1985, pp. 362-385. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40171067.

Speck, Bruce, et al., Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography. Greenwood P, 1999.

Starke-Meyerring, Doreen. “Writing Groups as Critical Spaces for Engaging Normalized Cultures of Writing in Doctoral Education.” Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in Practice and Theory, edited by Claire Aitchison and Cally Guerin, Routledge, 2014, pp. 65-81.

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COLLEAGUES, CLASSMATES, AND FRIENDS: GRADUATE VERSUS UNDERGRADUATE TUTOR IDENTITIES AND PROFESSIONALIZATION Jennifer Grouling Ball State University jgrouling@bsu.edu Abstract This study provides a new framework for thinking about the value of writing center work by illuminating how tutors define and negotiate their various and emergent identities as students and as professionals. We build on conversations about tutor identity to argue that tutors’ multiple roles affect the dynamics of the writing center as a whole. From interviews with graduate and undergraduate tutors about professionalization and the writing center, we reveal that the tutors’ level of resistance to or acceptance of writing center work impacts the extent to which they see themselves as burgeoning professionals within that space and, concomitantly, affects the sense of community in the writing center. At our site of study, undergraduate tutors who self-selected into writing center employment generally had much more positive associations with their writing center experiences than their graduate student counterparts, who were often compelled to work in the center as part of their assistantships. We argue then that while writing centers can be valuable in building the professional identities of both undergraduate and graduate tutors, the ways in which these different populations affect our centers is significant.

As such, writing center professionals at all levels should work to acknowledge different identities and foster community among tutors who come to us with multiple backgrounds, purposes, and agendas.

After two and a half years as a tutor, senior social work major Adam (all names are pseudonyms) is excited to graduate from college but sad to be leaving the writing center. It was, he says, the first “professional atmosphere” he worked in. For Adam, the writing center was a turning point from being a worker in a job to being a professional in a community of fellow professionals.

In contrast, international graduate student Aileen sees her first semester in the writing center only as a requirement of her teaching assistantship. When asked why she tutored, she comments that it was mandatory, stating that she worked there “because [she] didn’t have any option.” She goes on to explain that ten hours of her assistantship were spent in a mentor’s first-year writing class, but “the other ten hours should be covered by something somewhere” and that something happened to be the writing center.

Although Aileen later came to appreciate writing center work, her initial experience with the writing center is not uncommon for graduate teaching assistants.

These two stories appear separate, disconnected, and representative of different tutor experiences, yet !

Elisabeth H. Buck University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth ebuck@umassd.edu they both shaped the dynamics of the same writing center. This center at a mid-sized Midwestern university is housed within an English department and has a staff comprised of both undergraduate and graduate student tutors. Many of these graduate student tutors are not there by choice; rather, they are teaching assistants required to complete a semester’s worth of tutoring before they can begin teaching composition courses. We recognize that other centers operate with similar bifurcations; although graduate and undergraduate tutors make up our center’s staff, many other centers operate with a mixed personnel of undergraduate, graduate, and/or professional tutors.

However, even centers with a “homogeneous” tutor population (e.g., all undergraduate students) still employ vastly different majors, personalities, and levels of experience. When we look at the experiences of Adam and Aileen—two students who have disparate perceptions of their identities in relation to the center—what can they show us about the multifaceted nature of our writing center communities? What does the tension between these different tutor identities mean for our writing centers?

To understand different identities of tutors and how they develop in relationship to the professional space of a writing center, we combine data from two sets of interviews to answer the following research questions: 1) how do undergraduate and graduate tutors negotiate and define professional identities in relation to writing center work? and 2) how does compulsory versus self-selected employment in the writing center impact professional identity development? We build on previous research about tutor identity to show how the identities that emerged from our data (colleagues, classmates, and friends) affect the dynamics of the writing center as a whole.

We hypothesized, and the findings supported, that despite their seemingly higher professional status, graduate students who worked in the center as part of a requirement were less likely than self-selected undergraduates to incorporate writing center work into their professional identities. As a result of these differences, we argue that, as directors consider tutortraining and community building, they should be aware

Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 51 of and respond to the different identity positions that tutors take in relation to the writing center. They can also be more cognizant of the ways that these identities can affect the dynamics of the center and develop programs to ensure the continued professionalization of all writing center staff.

Tutor Identities and the Writing Center Anne Ellen Geller et al. conceptualize writing centers as spaces where different identities that are “in constant motion” interact (55). They draw on Thomas Michael Conroy, Neal Lerner, and Pamela J. Siska to talk about the “difficult boundary positions between student and professional, between tutor and professor stances, between full-fledged members of a profession and peripheral participants” (Geller et al. 68). While the literature often addresses identity conflicts of graduate students in the writing center, Geller et al. argue that such conflicts are not exclusive to graduate students.

Rather, they are natural when individuals negotiate the relationship between one identity and their various other communities. Although both graduate student tutors and undergraduate tutors engage in this process of negotiation, it is important to remember that they may approach that negotiation differently. First, changing from an undergraduate to a graduate student identity can be difficult for some students (Mattison; Rollins, Smith, and Westabrook). This shift may mean embracing the identity of researcher but may also involve taking on the somewhat conflicting identity of teacher. Students in a study by Jody D. Nyquist et al. felt conflict between the roles of teacher and researcher, a conflict faculty advisors reinforced by encouraging students to focus on research over teaching (20). This tension is certainly present when graduate students from a variety of research traditions and disciplines are asked to teach composition. Jennifer Grouling argues that graduate students may be frustrated if they have uncovered methods for being successful students but cannot find a “hidden formula” for teaching. They also may resist teaching when that identity conflicts with the way they see themselves as students, such as a TA in Grouling’s study who had trouble transitioning into a professional role at that same university where she had been an undergraduate student (Grouling). When an identity as writing center tutor gets added to that of teaching assistant and graduate student, the professionalization of the graduate TA becomes even more complex.

Graduate student identities are affected by the fact that writing center employment is often a compulsory pre-teaching requirement for new TAs. In Melissa Ianetta, Michael McCamley, and Catherine Quick’s

study, fifteen of twenty-eight writing program administrators surveyed reported that their training for TAs “always or sometimes” required mandatory work in the writing center (112). There are clear advantages to this system. Irene Clark asserts that “it provides opportunities to learn through firsthand observation how the writing process actually works” (347). Muriel Harris indicates that tutors receive insight as a result of being exposed to other instructors’ assignments and ways of commenting on essays (199). Jule Wallis and Adrienne Jenkins, whose institution has such a requirement, suggest that tutors gain helpful insight into students’ ways of knowledge acquisition. They note, “In sessions, GTAs learn what works best: what questions lead to engagement, what questions encourage active learning, what strategies lead to collaboration and revisions, and what approaches and responses create critical thinking” (168). We wonder, however, what it means for writing center and tutor identity when this role is in the service of learning how to teach.

In his essay “Just Between Me and Me”—as the title of the piece might imply—Michael Mattison presents an overview of the various bifurcations of identity that he felt resulted from his work as both a graduate student tutor and teaching assistant. Mattison notes that, “As much as you might want to lean towards the student-side of your life and commiserate with the student writers who come into the center… you’ll be blocked by the fact that you teach. And your relationship with your tutee will be influenced if they know you teach” (13-14). Mattison argues that, as a result, graduate student tutors often must view their “peer” designation as ambiguous. In addition, by encountering writing center work as a training program for teaching, it may be difficult for TAs to develop a professional identity as tutor, seeing it only as a transitional step to the professional identity of teacher.

Some graduate students may also have no larger interest in either teaching or tutoring following the completion of their degree(s). Christopher LeCluyse and Sue Mendelsohn argue that many graduate student tutors “may not necessarily see writing center work as professional development, and, indeed, most of the graduate consultants are not looking for careers in writing programs” (107). These perceptions ultimately impact the labor and agency of the writing center, as “Centers that rely on TA training programs for their writing center staffs can lack continuity… Mandating writing center work as part of TA preparation disempowers the writing center by removing its ability to select tutors on the basis of ability and interest” (Ianetta, McCamley, and Quick 119). In sum, placing graduate students in the writing center, especially those

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 52 who also teach and who are compelled to tutor in service of that teaching, will not be without consequences, both in terms of how tutors choose to identify and understand their various and shifting roles, and how these students impact the overall activity, cohesiveness, and mission of the writing center.

The identities of undergraduate tutors are also important and have been examined by writing center scholars. Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail’s Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project shows that “undergraduate peer tutors are creating one of the most important experiences in their undergraduate careers, a complex, multi-faceted experience whose influence persists not just years but decades after graduation” (13). They suggest that these influences include social attributes (such as listening and increased confidence) as well as pre-professional development and collegiality (gaining skills and collaboration techniques that transfer to professions) (14). Lauren Fitzgerald’s 2012 IWCA keynote also speaks of the writing center as a space for undergraduates to begin forming professional identities. Writing centers, she argues, should support undergraduate research efforts because, by attending conferences and being directly involved with writing center practice, undergraduates develop professional identities differently from other academic experiences.

Fitzgerald suggests that efforts to promote undergraduate research ultimately “replace traditional archetypes of teacher and student with a collaborative investigative mode” as well as “motivate students to learn by doing” (29). In sum, both Hughes, Gillespie, and Kail and Fitzgerald suggest that the potential for undergraduate students to form identifications— including developing social, professional, and academic skills—is heightened by work as a tutor, and the writing center thus emerges as an important and unique space to engage in conversations about undergraduate identity development.

The literature on tutor identity, then, seems to suggest that while all tutors can find value in their writing center experiences, they must also navigate their identities in relation to the other roles that they fulfill both on and off campus. In our study, we hope to jointly consider graduate and undergraduate students’ experiences in the writing center, and push against the possible tacit assumption that, by virtue of their more advanced educational experiences, graduate students are inherently more adept or invested tutors than their undergraduate counterparts. Our work therefore follows up on and connects these trends in the literature by interviewing and comparing data between undergraduate and graduate student tutors.

Site of Study In order to set the stage for our results, it is important to explain the makeup of our tutors and our tutor training at the time of our study. At a public Midwestern university of approximately 22,000 students, our writing center is physically located in and funded by the English department, but has clients from all different majors and years, from freshmen through graduate students. We typically function with between fifteen and twenty tutors, including two graduate student assistant directors, and a varying number of graduate and undergraduate tutors. In the fall, new TAs without prior composition teaching experience are assigned to work ten hours in the writing center. This means that we have an influx of up to fifteen graduate students while maintaining a small undergraduate staff (around five tutors). In the spring, however, the graduate students leave to teach composition, and we often hire up to ten new undergraduate tutors. While the graduate students all come from English—we have programs in rhetoric and composition, linguistics, TESOL, literature, and creative writing—our undergraduate tutors are pursuing multiple majors.

Thus, our makeup varies significantly between semesters, a point addressed in our study.

In terms of training, graduate students are assigned to the writing center during the semester that they prepare to teach. In that same semester, they work with a mentor in a composition class and take a practicum course. The practicum readings often include pedagogical theory from both education and composition, and may include some writing center pedagogy. Undergraduate tutors are not required to take a course on writing center theory and practice; however, we often require scholarly articles to be read as a part of our training orientation and meetings.

Initial training sessions for TAs last half a day as a part of TA orientation, and all tutors participate in bimonthly hour-long meetings. New tutors (both graduate and undergraduate) are also required to observe tutoring sessions for a couple of weeks before beginning tutoring themselves.1 Our writing center provides a relaxed environment with couches, a microwave, and a coffee maker; in short, it is an environment where tutors can congregate. In terms of how the staff dynamic impacted the social atmosphere of our writing center, casual observations revealed that, both during meetings and between tutoring sessions, graduate student tutors tended to gather together separately, often taking up the entire couch area with an undergraduate student left alone at a table across the center. While this might be the natural consequence of shared coursework and

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 53 interests, this physical separation from undergraduate tutors was often apparent during the course of our study.

Methodology This study brings together research from two different IRB-approved studies, both of which used semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews of writing center tutors.2 The first focused more broadly on the question of professional identity in the writing center with both graduate and undergraduate participants, and the second focused more specifically on the role of graduate TAs in the writing center. While not identical, both data sets looked at professional identity and the relationship between work as tutors and other elements of the participants’ lives. We therefore felt that the data sets spoke to each other in interesting ways and could be studied together. The first yielded a total of seven interviews, two with English TAs, one with an hourly graduate student worker, and four with undergraduate tutors. Of these participants, only two were not seeking English degrees, but both had an interest in education.

The second data set also consisted of seven interviews; however, all of the participants were English TAs who had spent one to two semesters in the writing center as a part of their assistantship. Although our data is skewed toward TAs in terms of participant numbers, our interviews with the undergraduate tutors were involved and fruitful. The interviews took place over three years (2011-2014) so that the participants did not represent any one cohort of writing tutors.

Grouling gathered the first set of data over two different years, recruiting current and former tutors via email. These tutors were asked a variety of questions that varied somewhat based on the participant’s background. Key questions included: 1. Describe your reaction when you discovered you would be working at the Writing Center.

2. Describe your interactions working with other tutors. How did these relationships affect your tutoring practices?

3. (If teaching) How did tutoring in the Writing Center affect your teaching practices?

4. What are your future career goals? How do you see your work at the Writing Center affecting this?

Buck gathered the second set of data by selecting participants based on their responses to a recruitment email that was sent to all teaching assistants in the English department. These interviews did not cover as

much territory as Grouling’s interviews. For example, in addition to the questions above, Grouling asked participants to describe a typical tutoring session and to define “composition,” neither of which overlapped with Buck’s interviews and were not relevant to the new combined study. However, Buck did ask a series of questions about shifting identities, as perceived through the lens of writing center work, that paralleled those asked by Grouling. Some key questions included: 1. What brought you to tutor in the Writing Center? a) Probing question: Was this the only reason that you worked there?

2. In your view, what was the purpose of working in the Center?

3. Could you describe in what ways you view your work in the Writing Center as intersecting with your teaching practices?

(By “intersecting,” I mean: how do you translate your experiences as a tutor into your teaching practices?) a) Probing question: What do you think is the meaning of working in the Writing Center as it relates to your teaching experiences?

We each transcribed our interviews and then analyzed the data collaboratively. Drawing from Saldana’s method of using “first impressions” for initial coding and returning to the data multiple times to further refine the most salient themes, we completed a first pass coding by pulling emergent themes from the data (4, 8). We used coding memos and meetings to discuss the themes, and through this process we identified three general categories: reasons for tutoring, different communities that tutors identified with, and skills learned in the writing center that transferred to other contexts. Although reasons for tutoring and transferable skills were both important, we felt that they both related to the identification with different communities. For example, tutors joined the writing center because of their connection to their academic community of graduate students who were required to tutor or because they were connected to a social community and had friends who already tutored.

Similarly, skills were transferred to professional communities that related to a student’s career or to academic communities as tutors discovered things about their own writing processes. Thus, our second pass coding involved color-coding for different communities. We looked for moments when participants seemed to be relating to academic communities, professional community in the writing

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 54 center, professional communities other than the writing center, and social communities as defined below: Red = Academic Communities. Includes references to courses, degree requirements, attending conferences, and conducting research.

Green = Professional Writing Center. Includes discussion of a professional identity as a tutor, use of writing center jargon, discussion of training/improving tutoring, and learning from other tutors as colleagues.

Blue = Other Professional Communities.

Includes discussion of career goals outside the center, including teaching as a career.

Yellow = Social Communities. Includes references to friends, social interaction both in and outside the writing center.

Finally, we decided that what was particularly striking in our data was the way that individual identity related to these different communities. We therefore returned to the data to look for how tutors expressed different identities and how they functioned in relationship to the communities we had previously identified. Those identities were colleagues (which related to the professional community of the writing center), students (which related to courses and the academic community), and friends (which related to the social community). We pulled these terms directly from our transcripts, but our coding also included times when participants implied these concepts by talking about that type of relationship. For example, mentioning “hanging out” with a fellow tutor socially was coded as “friend.” While other identities were expressed in our data, we feel these three identities— because of their relationship to the different types of communities we identified in our coding—are most informative for discussing the way that writing tutor identity interacts with writing center practice.

Like most empirical research, this study is limited both by the scope and setting of our data. Our interviewees, for the most part, only had experiences working at our writing center, which is situated within and necessarily impacted by its location, its student population, and its larger relationship to its mid-size Midwestern university. Similarly, our approaches to this research were necessarily informed by our own experiences in this and other writing centers, as a former director (Grouling) and former assistant

director/graduate tutor (Buck). Our own casual observations in these roles often worked in concert with our formal data. In addition, our roles and relative levels of institutional authority might then have impacted the ways that participants responded, as Grouling was an assistant professor/supervisor and Buck was the interviewees’ peer, who interacted with many of the participants in both social and academic settings. While our experiences and those of our participants exist within this context, we believe that other writing centers that employ both undergraduate tutors and graduate teaching assistants will find them familiar and that similar methods could be used to study identity at other institutions.

Resisting Professional Identity in the Writing Center Based on our research, the ways in which participants came to be tutors had a clear effect on their professional identities. The clearest difference was that the graduate students were required to work in the center their first semester as a part of their assistantship while undergraduates applied. When asked about beginning their work at the writing center, all but one of the undergraduates talked about applying because they felt it would be a rewarding professional experience, while all but one of the graduate assistants first expressed that it was a requirement.

Undergraduate Elaine expressed a deep desire to help other students and forward her career in teaching.

Another English education major, Mary, cited her desire to improve her skills conferencing with students as her motivation for applying to the writing center.

Social work major Adam didn’t originally apply because of his career but did explain that his love of writing led him to explore the job.

In contrast, for TAs, the connection between teaching and the writing center was something that was deemed good for them as decided by the department, not something they chose. When asked about why they worked in the writing center, eight of the nine TAs interviewed responded that they were required to do so as a part of their assistantship. Kent stated, “First and foremost it was a requirement, but I also think that considering what needed to happen in terms of preparing people to teach it makes sense to start in [that] environment.” Others took a more cynical approach. Rosalind, for example, stated, “It was required— [the WPA] said that if you wanted funding this is what you have to do!” TAs often followed up by explaining that the writing center was a place for the department to put them while they learned to teach, either seeing this as busy work or as a positive

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 55 opportunity. Madison commented directly on this tension: I think there are two ways that you could argue it. I think the nice-sounding way is that it sort of allowed us to get experience working with other students who are at the college level and just ease us into the whole interaction [...] The other thing is that [...] I mean, they have to pay us anyway because we’re on an assistantship and they’re not comfortable with us teaching for the first semester, which I totally understand, and they’re like, “Let’s put you to work in the Writing Center!”

Madison also experienced difficulties transferring what she learned working in the center to her teaching experiences. She claimed that since tutoring is “very other person-focused,” and she has a “sarcastic” personality, she had “a much easier time working oneon-one with that person than [...] in front of an entire class of students who don’t [...] take [her] seriously.”

Rather than embrace tutoring because she likes oneon-one interactions, however, Madison seemed to have a negative view of her writing center work due to her struggle to explicitly connect her tutoring experience to the classroom. This frustration was compounded by the fact that Madison, and other TAs, had not chosen writing center work for themselves.

It is not uncommon for TAs to struggle with their role as both students and teachers during teachertraining and in the practicum course (Grouling). It is not that classrooms cannot ever be professional spaces, but Grouling defines the student identity of TAs as one where they look for right answers from the WPA on how to teach rather than develop their own practices. Many of the TAs we interviewed also expressed student rather than professional roles, seeing the writing center as a way to learn what the WPA wanted them to learn about teaching. Kent explained his time in the writing center as “taking what you learned in [practicum] and putting it in a holding pattern until you get in front of the classroom.” When writing center tutoring is made a part of that practicum experience, TAs such as Jillian view it as “a grace period to get our feet wet.” Just as the classroom is often a pre-professional space, so too the writing center becomes a space where TAs view themselves as students learning the “real” work of teaching rather than as professionals doing the real work of tutoring.

TAs may struggle to see writing center work as its own valid enterprise or tutoring as a possible long-term identity for themselves. By approaching tutoring from this mindset, TAs often see tutoring as valuable only in

learning the right way to teach and become frustrated when direct connections do not present themselves.

These TAs may thus have a more negative and resistant view to working in the writing center, as evidenced by Madison’s reactions.

In addition, the amount of time that a tutor spent in the center affected the way they related to that space. Many TAs only tutored during the required semester, knowing they would soon move on to something else. Even undergraduate tutors who initially were just looking for a job seemed more likely to see their writing center work as a part of their professional identity than required TAs, in part because they often worked there longer.

Developing Professional Identity in the Writing Center In contrast to the TAs who were required to work in the writing center, our undergraduate tutors selfselected into employment. Although they made connections between their majors and careers and the writing center, they did not necessarily approach tutoring with the expectation that it would prepare them for other areas of work. While multiple TAs stressed that they worked in the writing center because the English department needed a pre-teaching “job” for them, several undergraduate participants referred to the writing center as more than just a job. For example, Adam explained that he came to the writing center looking for a position that would be more rewarding than his previous job working in an office that coordinated events on campus. However, in addition to a rewarding job, he found a whole field of study that he did not know existed. “I was really surprised at first,” Adam stated, “like this deep subculture I didn’t realize existed […] there are papers and studies on writing centers. They’re taking themselves really seriously. I gained an appreciation for that.” This shift to see himself as not just a writing center employee but as a member of a “subculture” that studies writing centers is a key shift toward a professional identity.

While English education major Elaine made similar connections as TAs in terms of being able to test out teaching techniques and learn about students, one of the most interesting parts of her interview is the way she presents herself as a writing center professional in contrast with the professional community of high school teachers. Rather than seeing the writing center as an identity that leads to teaching, she actually favors her writing center identity as a larger part of her professional philosophy and practice. For example, when talking about misconceptions about the center, Elaine stated, “We don’t do that.” In contrast, when

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 56 talking about high school teachers, Elaine distanced herself using the pronoun “they” instead of “we.” She set herself in contrast with other teachers at several points in her interview. She values walking around and giving students individual attention while her teaching supervisor stays behind the desk; she values multimodality (something we address in our center) while “English teachers” don’t accept this as real reading or writing. She expressed frustration when teachers tell her that they do not engage with material that is not on standardized tests. When these teachers say “we don’t do that,” Elaine pushes back as someone with a professional identity outside that “we.” Elaine is more a part of the “we” of writing center tutors than high school teachers. She talked excitedly about how she will incorporate conferences, instill confidence in student writers, and focus on the writing process (all writing center values) once she gets her own classroom. It is clear that Elaine is invested in the part of her professional identity that comes from tutoring and that it has become a true part of her professional identity not just a stepping stone. In fact, she even mentioned developing a writing center in a high school.

Going to conferences was another important component that helped undergraduates see themselves as professionals and the writing center as a professional space. While this could have been beneficial to graduate tutors as well, they were less likely to attend conferences if they only worked a single semester in the center. Undergraduate tutor Mary directly referenced the difference between student and colleague identities when talking about her experience attending a writing center conference: Also, by attending the WC conference I got to know people from our WC better. Instead of being just a student, I was now, like, kind of a colleague or a coworker. I didn’t feel so young anymore, but part of something bigger than just going to class and sleeping.

This example shows the power of such professional development activities in adopting the identity of a professional in the writing center. Mary takes this identity seriously. While she is a good student, Mary’s student identity is shown as less professional here, associated only with “going to class and sleeping,” presumably not at the same time.

While it might be expected that English education majors would find writing center tutoring a valuable professional experience, one might think that, as a social work major, Adam would have more difficulty embracing the identity of a writing center professional.

However, more than anyone, he continually used the word “professional” to describe the space of the writing center. He saw his writing center work as a part of his overall growing identity as a professional, even as the origin for it. For example, as an individual who hopes to be a school counselor, Adam realized that nurturing would be an important part of his career. Just as Mary contrasted the role of student with that of colleague, Adam directly contrasted the role of friend with the role of professional. It is in the writing center where Adam felt like he learned the difference between nurturing a friend and nurturing in a professional context: The writing center really was the first place where I was able to develop that, what does it look like to be nurturing in an appropriate way in a professional setting [...]And I think that’s essential in the social work field because at the core of what we’re doing as social workers is developing relationships with people, and so, it’s really important to, like on a deeper level, be separating personal and professional.

In some ways, this may be seen as an example of a skill that Adam developed in the writing center that transfers to his career. However, the way that Adam talked about this experience seems to go beyond just learning a skill. Educational theorists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger argue that “learning and a sense of identity are inseparable: They are aspects of the same phenomenon” (115). Adam fully learns here because he is able to shift his identity, to separate personal and professional “on a deeper level” and understand what it looks like to be a professional.

The challenge is that it really takes time to construct professional identities as Elaine, Mary, and Adam have. Certainly a part of the resistance we saw with TAs in the writing center is because they approached it as a requirement; however, it may be too much to expect TAs to develop a professional identity as a writing center tutor in just one semester. As Willis and Jankins note in advocating for ongoing mentoring and collaborations, “teacher training should occur throughout a GTA’s career and at multiple nodes of interaction. [We] acknowledge the complex processes GTAs experience as they encounter new roles and responsibilities as well as the complexities of programs providing support for GTAs” (162). Again, learning to be an effective and invested teacher or tutor is an ongoing process and may take varying amounts of time for different people—for some, this identity may never develop. Even those TAs who later came back and applied for positions as assistant directors of the center

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 57 sometimes only began with a vague interest. Graduate tutor Jillian explained in a follow-up interview that she was interested in an administrative position but was too afraid to apply since “it wasn’t [her] specialization.”

It wasn’t a part of her professional identity (or specialization) yet. As a result of being invited to apply by the director, Jillian gained confidence and saw the potential for herself to develop into a writing center professional. This identity was solidified when she helped interview tutors for openings in the spring semester. She began to see the center as “a community of writers supporting each other.” The identity of “writer” was a key part of Jillian’s professional identity, and she began to connect that professional identity with one of writing center administrator: “I began to look at my AD position as situated within this community as I participated in it, instead of being isolated as an authority figure behind the desk who answered the phone or an occasional tutor question.”

As an assistant director, Jillian had both the time and a position of trust that helped her to identify as a writing center professional within a community of other professionals.

Combining Friendship

Professional

Identity

and

Tutors also build their sense of themselves as colleagues by learning from each other, and being comfortable with one another socially can help foster a sense of community. Mary talked about specific techniques used by other tutors that she added to her repertoire. For example, she learned Chicago citation style from Nancy, an hourly graduate student tutor getting a Ph.D. in music. Elaine mentioned that she valued the calm nature that Adam had in working with his clients. Victor, who worked at another writing center before starting his Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition and becoming an assistant director at our writing center (and who has since taken a position as a writing center director), explained that he felt that this sense of collegiality is not inherent to writing center work. Rather there was some ineffable quality that fostered that environment at our center: I think here, especially in our writing center, there’s a really cool atmosphere of collaboration, and helping each other and learning from each other [...] I feel like at [former writing center], I worked with a lot of really nice, really cool, really smart people, too, but it didn’t quite happen that way, so I’m not sure why. [...] In our writing center people are

really eager to learn from each other and to help each other.

Could the ineffable quality that Victor associates with our writing center represent a combination of professionalism and friendship?

As Beth Godbee writes, in discussing what role friendship can play in the writing center, “Our working relationships have developed through learning about and respecting each other… It is in life experience and our basic humanity that we find equality. Rather than striving for peerness (sameness), we should get to know writers as people and work toward friendship” (15). Although Godbee describes here the (possible) relationships between tutor and writer, this idea of complicating peerness could extend to tutor-to-tutor relationships as well. One of the reasons Adam called the writing center “the first professional atmosphere” he worked in was that he met “colleagues who became friends.” Adam explained that “seeing how different people can come together” from backgrounds such as “law, theater, and social work” and form friendships was not something he had expected but was something he really valued. Nancy, a music student, noted that “we’re all eggheads, in a good way,” and that the writing center is a place to have great conversations with other intelligent people. Likewise, Adam mentioned that he “just really enjoyed being with peers who also loved writing and loved helping people.”

Adam talked about the importance of “hanging out” when clients failed to show up for appointments. He noted that this time is not only productive for building friendships, but that it also “spilled over into being beneficial for the clients” by creating an overall welcoming and friendly atmosphere. Rich noted that tutors become close because they “notice the same stuff, and have some of the same beefs with clients.”

When shared repertoires failed, and problems arose, tutors felt able to discuss those issues and that discussion helped them feel close to the community in the writing center. At times these connections extended to social communities outside the writing center. Adam mentioned hanging out with fellow tutors outside of the center, and Rich noted that working in the center was a way to get to know other first-year graduate students and form social relationships. However, most seemed to agree that the social friendships formed in the center helped tutors be comfortable with one another when they needed professional support as tutors—asking for advice, sharing common struggles, and sharing a love of helping others with writing.

However, there were also some indications that social relationships were strained between graduate student tutors and undergraduates and that this

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 58 affected the overall sense of professional community in the center. Mary and Elaine shared this sense of comradery with undergraduates (and even the non-TA graduate tutor, Nancy), but both were acutely aware of the difference between the fall semester with a high number of graduate teaching assistants, and the spring with more undergraduate tutors. Elaine talked about feeling left out of conversations with the graduate students, particularly the TAs. Mary, who was overall very positive about the welcoming social atmosphere of the center, mentioned that during the semester with the graduate students she “didn’t feel that sense of community” that she so valued. Victor referred to his former writing center community as one of “isolated” individuals, people working together but not necessarily interacting. Whether or not that social interaction extends to after hours, it seems important that tutors are able to interact socially as “colleagues who become friends” within our writing center, and those relationships were harder for some undergraduates to develop when the primary tutors were graduate student TAs.

Conclusion: Connecting Social, Academic and Professional Identities From our study, as well as previous research, we conclude that there are important differences in the ways that the undergraduate participants perceive their professional identity in the writing center. While graduate student tutors seemed to largely value their employment, at our university where writing center work is mandatory for new TAs, many saw their experiences as related primarily to developing a teaching identity. These students adopted the identities of classmates and friends, but as undergraduate Mary noted in her interview, “It wasn’t the tutoring center that brought them together.” She saw the graduate students as classmates to each other who were brought together by common courses rather than as colleagues in the center. This difference in how tutors came to the writing center had a real, tangible effect on the professional community. Mary and Elaine both expressed difficulty interacting with their graduate student colleagues who formed their own groups on the couches talking about their courses rather than their tutoring. They expressed that they were less likely to seek help from or share strategies for tutoring with the graduate student TAs because of this separation. In this interaction, we see one way that different identities in the writing center can impact our writing center communities. Undergraduates felt excluded from and separate from the graduate student tutors, which

diminished their sense of each other as fellow professionals.

As this study demonstrates, compulsory graduate student employment could ultimately reinforce the concept of the writing center as merely a place to “test the waters” en route to a larger professional goal, as opposed to supporting a view of the writing center as an independent professional setting and academic community. While the same might seem true for undergraduates, this study suggests that those who spend more time in the writing center and who are voluntarily employed there are able to better view the center as its own professional space, which we believe is ideal. Indeed, that space serves a significant role in their lives as it is often the first real professional site they interact with. As such, the writing center occupies a crucial role in the professional development of undergraduate tutors, as also suggested by Hughes, Gillespie, and Kail. Similarly, the graduate student participants who elected to pursue assistant director positions in the writing center developed a greater sense of professional identity based on these new experiences. For example, international graduate student Aileen now hopes to start a writing center in her native country, and she noted that, “Only by gaining administrative experience will [she] stand a chance of knowing what types of work are included in the establishment and operation of a center.” She also saw in her administrative role the potential for activism in terms of developing more resources for ESL students, as well as the opportunity to “help ESL students on our campus on a larger scale.” This voluntary employment and greater time commitment will lead to stronger professional identity in the center.

While this study is not intended as an argument against the presence of graduate students in the writing center, directors and tutors should be aware of the dynamics established by a staff with diverse academic and professional experiences. As suggested by Ianetta, McCamley, and Quick, compulsory graduate student employment might negate the writing center’s ability to select tutors who are both interested in writing center work and possess the skills to be effective tutors, thus also devaluing the writing center as an independent and important professional community. For us, an ideal center is a professional community, one in which all tutors are recognized as professionals themselves. In order to create this environment, our participants’ experiences suggest that any opportunities for tutors to engage in professional work beyond tutoring—perhaps by doing research on/in the center that leads to a conference presentation as Mary talked about in her interview—could help them build their identities not just as professionals, but as professionals specifically

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 59 within a writing center space. As recent publications in the field, such as Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s Strategies for Writing Center Research (2015) and Lauren Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta’s The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015) illustrate, engaging in research can be one way for students to view the writing center as a space for legitimate and rigorous academic inquiry. We would therefore encourage both tutors and administrators to seize on opportunities for developing research practices within the Writing Center, via recurring workshops or training sessions. In addition, our work suggests that social dynamics are also important in making the writing center a professional space. When tutors feel like they can draw on one another’s professional expertise and not be excluded socially, they become colleagues rather than isolated students (graduate students vs. undergraduates, English majors vs. non-English majors, etc.).

We suggest that directors and tutors be aware of this dynamic and work actively to build community among tutors of various backgrounds, particularly between undergraduate and graduate tutors. In more recent communication with Jillian in her role as Assistant Director, she noted that new steps are being taken to better integrate the new graduate assistants with the existing staff of undergraduate tutors. The assistant directors and director will write welcome letters to the new TAs, as well as work during both the fall orientation session and weekly staff meetings to address any perceived divides in the two groups.

Graduate assistant directors are therefore in a unique role to help bridge the gap between graduate and undergraduate tutors. They can be on the look-out for instances where graduate students may drift to talking about their schoolwork while an isolated undergraduate looks on, and they can model their own professionalism.

Soon after both sets of interviews were completed, the center moved to a new location in the building.

Buck was able to informally observe some of the ways that this new layout impacted tutor relationships. A former office was converted into a lounge for tutors, and this seemed to have the effect of creating a place where graduate and undergraduate tutors could more easily co-mingle, perhaps emphasizing the importance of space in facilitating connections where they might not naturally exist. Future studies might investigate the role that space plays in facilitating different types of relationships among tutors.

A mentoring program where experienced tutors— regardless of their academic standing—are paired up with first-time undergraduate and graduate tutors could help facilitate learning and mitigate (possible) inherent hierarchies. Programs like this can encourage tutors to

be more active in breaking down identity-based barriers themselves. For example, new graduate student tutors can actively seek out undergraduate mentors for their expertise while undergraduates may learn from graduate tutors about their experiences in the classroom or learning rhetoric and composition pedagogy. Additionally, at institutions where tutors must complete a credit-bearing course, cross-listing the class as a graduate seminar would enable graduate and undergraduate students to train and learn together.

Even if the relationships between graduate and undergraduate students never ultimately turn into friendships, they create a sense of collegiality and professionalism in the center. While not all centers harbor this dynamic between graduate and undergraduate tutors specifically, we hope that the takeaway here is that directors must be active in understanding and responding to the various identities maintained and developed in their center. In a writing center setting that includes a variety of labor (graduate and undergraduate, compulsory and self-selected), however, empowering the center—and all the individuals who work within it—will always remain challenging.

Notes 1. Courses in writing center studies have been added at both the undergraduate and graduate levels since our study, but neither is currently required for employment in the Writing Center.

2. We did not share identifying information from our studies with each other. Rather we used transcribed copies of the interviews with identifying information removed.

Works Cited Clark, Irene. “Preparing Future Composition Teachers in the Writing Center.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 39, no. 3, October 1998, pp.

347-50.

Conroy, Thomas Michael, Neal Lerner, and Pamela J. Siska. “Graduate Students as Writing Tutors: Role Conflict and the Nature of Professionalization.”

Weaving Knowledge Together: Writing Centers and Collaboration, edited by Carol Peterson Haviland, Maria Notarangelo, Lene Whitley-Putz, and Thia Wolf. Taylor and Francis, 1998. pp. 128-51.

Fitzgerald, Lauren. “Undergraduate Writing Tutors as Researchers: Redrawing Boundaries.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 17-35.

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Colleagues, Classmates, and Friends • 60 Fitzgerald, Lauren and Melissa Ianetta. The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research. Oxford UP, 2015.

Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth Boquet. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, Utah State University Press, 2006.

Godbee, Beth. “A (Re)congition of Peerness as Friendship.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 29, no. 6, 2005, pp. 13-15. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v29/29.6.pdf.

Grouling, Jennifer. “Resistance and Identity Formation: The Journey of the Graduate StudentTeacher.” Composition Forum, vol. 32, 2015. compositionforum.com/issue/32/resistance.php.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Strategies for Writing Center Research. Parlor Press, 2015.

Harris, Muriel. “‘What Would you Like to Work on Today?’: The Writing Center as a Site for Teacher Training.” Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Programs, Practices, edited by Betty P. Pytlik and Sarah Liggett, Oxford UP, 2001, pp.

194-207.

Hughes, Bradley, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail.

“What They Take with Them: Findings From the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project.”

Writing Center Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010, pp. 1246.

Ianetta, Melissa, Michael McCamley, and Catherine Quick. “Taking Stock: Surveying the Relationship of the Writing Center and TA Training.” Writing Program Administration, vol. 31, nos. 1-2, 2007, pp.

104-123.

Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge UP, 1991.

LeCluyse, Christopher and Sue Mendelsohn. “Training as Invention: Topoi for Graduate Writing Consultants.” (E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center, edited by Melissa Nicolas, Fountainhead, 2008. pp. 103-118.

Mattison, Michael. “Just Between Me and Me: A Letter to Myself about Being a Graduate Student Tutor and Administrator.” (E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center, edited by Melissa Nichols. Fountainhead, 2008. pp. 11-25.

Nyquist, Jody, Laura Manning, Donald H. Wulff, Ann E. Austin, Jo Sprague, Patricia K. Fraser, Claire Calcagno, and Bettina Woodford. “On the Road to Becoming a Professor: The Graduate Student Experience.” Change, vol. 31, no. 3, 1999, pp. 1827.

Rollins, Brooke, Trixie G. Smith, and Evelyn Westabrook. “Collusion and Collaboration:

Concealing Authority in the Writing Center.”

(E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center, edited by Melissa Nicolas. Fountainhead, 2008. pp. 119-39.

Saldaña, Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 2nd ed., SAGE Publications Ltd, 2012.

Wallis, Jule and Adrienne Jankins. “Collaborative Development: Reflective Mentoring for GTAs.” Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: Transcending Boundaries, edited by Alice Johnston Myatt and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Palgrave, 2016, pp.

161-178.

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REVIEW: WRITING GROUPS FOR DOCTORAL EDUCATION AND BEYOND Mary Hedengren The University of Houston Clear Lake mary.hedengren@gmail.com Aitchison, Claire, and Cally Guerin. Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in Practice and Theory. London: Routledge, 2014. Paperback. $52.75 Writing groups are frequently one of the key resources that writing centers use to help graduate writers progress in their projects and develop academic writing habits, but we know surprisingly little about how they work. Thirty years have passed since Anne Ruggles Gere’s landmark Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications (1987), but still, conventional wisdom on writing groups is frequently just as anecdotal and haphazard as the conventional wisdom on the writer in the lonely garret. In recent years, there has been even more substantive evidence to improve graduate writing resources; nonetheless, Claire Aitchison (2010) has declared, “writing group practices remain understudied” (83). If writing groups are becoming part of the writing center landscape, we need a robust research tradition to demonstrate their best practices.

Claire Aitchison and Cally Guerin’s 2014 collection Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond begins to remedy that omission by supplying the needed theoretical frameworks for researchers and practitioners of graduate writing groups. Practice and theory are both well represented in the collection, which opens with a subsection on “Setting the Scene,” then provides scholarly frameworks in “Theory and Reflection,” and ends with “Pedagogy in Practice.” The ways to practice writing groups are dizzyingly diverse and this compilation highlights the many possibilities of practice, but I’d like to focus on the chapters that create a foundation for the study and practice of doctoral writing groups across disciplines and departments as they come together in the writing center.

First, we need a broad, systemic definition of what these different writing groups look like, for scholars and participants alike. In her chapter, Sarah Haas provides a definitional typology for writers’ groups, outlining such characteristics as meeting activities, leadership, and purpose as a way to avoid confusion and create cohesion with new groups (42). Haas reports how she found that “Variety is necessary, as well as enriching, but it is also frustrating and confusing for the uninitiated” (43). Her typology provides novice administrators and group members with a vocabulary to describe the elements of their own

writing groups. This vocabulary includes such key elements as what happens during and in-between sessions, who is in charge, and what is the purpose of the writing group. Articulating these elements early in the process can ease anxiety for new writing members and facilitators alike.

The variety of writing groups stems, in part, from the variety of identities that participants claim. Writing Groups in Doctoral Education and Beyond invokes a range of writer identities: Linda Li and Cally Guerin each point out the confidence that writing groups give ELL writers. Other contributors discuss how WAC writing groups include women, migrants, and other “nontraditional” academic writers. And anyone can be hesitant to identify as a writer, as Lucia Thesen’s and Ange Bosanquet et al.’s chapters both illustrate.

Through the same sort of structured writing practice that writing centers have long embraced, writing group participants of all sorts can see themselves as independent scholars.

But how independent? However accepting of each other’s identities, writing groups often struggle with identifying group authority. This collection emphasizes, that unlike the hierarchal candidate-advisor/studentteacher relationships that many graduate students navigate every day, authority in the third space of the writing group can be productively dispersed. Writing groups that erase the hierarchies of academia can seem less intimidating for novice writers. Michelle Maher celebrates how “both students and faculty can feel psychologically safe to make transparent their struggles to write” (82). The graduate students in our center's writing groups are constantly being judged: by hiring committees, by dissertation advisors, by instructors. As Anthony Paré asks in his chapter, why shouldn’t we “offer students as many opportunities as possible to work socially, to test ideas out in safe, collaborative settings, to hear others’ comments when the stakes are still low?” (25).

The leveling of authority in writing groups also means that feedback doesn’t come from noblesse oblige. While advisors or writing center consultants give feedback as part of their terms of employment, true peers give good feedback because they expect to

Book Review • 62 receive it later. In her chapter, Claire Aitchison posits that “Writing group feedback … is a deeply social practice that is mutually advantageous, and, at its best, combines the best elements of scholarly peer review and traditional feedback” (62). I have seen a group member give up her own sustained writing time to make comments on another group member’s work, motivated, perhaps, by obligation to her group-mates.

Such an occurrence would be rare among our regularly employed staff. Cally Guerin’s chapter reads such sacrifice through gifting theory. Instead of the “gift exchange. . . disinterested and without expectation of reciprocity,” writing group feedback anticipates “later, attentive feedback,” even if no one knows “precisely when their gift giving might be repaid” (130). Far from being a place of relentless generosity, many writing groups operate under quid-pro-quo conditions. No one is the master, but no one is the patron.

In many writing centers, we encourage writing groups as a non-invasive way to encourage regular, supportive, and productive writing and, especially, writing groups may seem like the answer to the problems of isolated graduate writing. But often the impetus for writing group members and administration alike is more Gradgrindian: writing groups lead to successful writing (Moore 2003, MacLeod et al 2012).

When a writing center or department implements a writing group, they often aim to improve time-todegree or publication timetables. In this collection, Doreen Starke-Meyerring questions whether writing groups can instead “serve as critical spaces for rethinking normalized institutional cultures of research writing where institutional change can be pushed” (79).

Ultimately, increased research in graduate writing groups will let us make wise decisions about whether, and how, to incorporate graduate writing groups into our writing centers, recognizing the limits and possibilities of different practices.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. SIU Press, 1987.

Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Composing a Discipline: The Role of Scholarly Journals in the Disciplinary Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition Since 1950.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 322-348.

Lovitts, Barbara E. Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study.

Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

MacDonald, Susan Peck. “Problem Definition in Academic Writing.” College English, vol. 49, no. 3, 1987, pp. 315-331.

MacLeod, Iain, Laura Steckley and Rowena Murray.

“Time is Not Enough: Promoting Strategic Engagement with Writing for Publication.” Studies in Higher Education, vol. 37, no. 6, 2012, 641-654.

Moore, Sarah. “Writers’ Retreats for Academics: Exploring and Increasing the Motivation to Write.” Journal of Further and Higher Education vol. 27, no. 3, 2003, 333-342.

Works Cited Aitchison, Claire. “Learning Together to Publish: Writing Group Pedagogies for Doctoral Publishing.” Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond, edited by Claire Aitchison, Barbara Kamler, and Alison Lee, Routledge, 2010, pp. 83-100.

Gardner, Susan K. “’What's Too Much and What's Too Little?’: the Process of Becoming an Independent Researcher in Doctoral Education.”

The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 79, no. 3, 2008, pp. 326-350.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 2 (2017) www.praxisuwc.com!

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